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Well, according to the co-producer of Al Gore’s movie, the debate is all all over…

“Laurie David, said in a prepared statement. “There is no opposing view to science, which is fact, and the facts are clear that global warming is here, now.”

Or this gem…Exxon is now apparently going to stop funding of global warming “skeptics”. Sounds like the pressure being put on by some members of Congress as well as the simple fact that it is now controlled by the Democats has them worried…

Now you can see why the hockey team says they’ve moved on. If the pro-agw movement can reduce/eliminate potential contrarian points of view, it’s going to make it that much more difficult to get to the truth of matter. It also makes sites like this that much more important.

I have been watching this site for about five months now – I came to it from RC and found a refreshing honesty; then Monckton happened and I was totally hooked. I have hestitated to say anything because I am somewhat in awe of the quality of the science which, despite having read New Scientist since it started, often goes clean over my head.
It is the that damned hockeystick that irritates me and the attitude of those you find at Grist and other hysterics who simply will not listen to reason.
I agree wholeheartedly, this site is very neccessary.

#1 — “the facts are clear that global warming is here, now.” Laurie David is literally right. It is pretty clear that things have warmed up since about 1880 or so, though by how much is not so clear.

The real question at issue is how much of the warming is due to human-produced CO2. When someone like Laurie David or Al Gore talks about “global warming” they really mean anthropogenic global warming (AGW), even if they leave the adjective unspoken. Everyone knows the code.

But anthropogenic global warming is not at all clear. It’s not clear whether AGW is happening at all, and not clear whether AGW can be detected against background variation even if it were happening. Therefore, Laurie David is implicately wrong.

What is clear is that the HS is a crock. It’s also clear, even though no climate physicist seems to talk about it, that the uncertainty limits in GCM temperature projections are much larger than the AGW effect they purport to reveal. Attribution of GW to A, therefore, is also, currently, a crock. That may change if GCMs become about 10-fold more accurate (not in terms of grid resolution but in terms of physical completeness with respect to climate).

The crockness of the HS won’t ever improve, though. If anything, that trait will grow ever more manifest. Thank-you Steve and Ross of the “M” variety.

I’m not always that happy with Elsevier and their high prices for journal articles, but one of their saving graces is to post the January or February issue for many of the journals they host on line for free.

In the February ’07 issue of Dendrochronologia, there an interesting article here on a paleoclimatic reconstruction using juuniper tress in the Kola Peninsula. They show solar minima corresponding to temperature decreases, including the recent decreases in 1900 and 1960. The chornolgies “do not indicate a temperature rise at the end of the XX century”. They do however indicate a warm Medieval Optimum.

“Both the European temperature reconstruction and the juniper chronology from Kola Peninsula (Fig. 4) demonstrate that the (global) warming observed in the last century was not an extraordinary one. The Earth’s climate experienced even warmer temperatures 1000 years ago during the so-called Medieval Climatic Optimum (1000–1300 AD) when greenhouse gases as a consequence of human influence were not present to influence the climate”.

#1. Regarding Ms. David, she has a conflict of interest via her connection to Al Gore and his economic self-interest in pushing carbon market trading. There doesn’t seem to be a consumerist voice in this country anymore, like Nader’s folks, who revel in exposing scams unfortunately. As for the Exxon article, note they are not giving up all their funding. They specifically dropped a flak pushing the “CO2 is good for you” line. Gosh, that’s awful PR. Nevertheless the Exxon folk are in a pickle. They could advertise the truth about the variety of monetary forces behind the AGW crowd and carbon trading and that their voiced concerns about energy independence, alternatives for vehicles, and cleaner air could be solved by direct investments and government programs without carbon trading and validated without the carbon/AGW ruse, but hey, they’re Exxon and heavily invested in overseas oil. Since the recent Democrat bills are oriented toward carbon trading (that’s cap PLUS trade), esp. the Bingaman bill, with some alternative energy funding attached as a distraction, and not auto emissions and efficiencies, Exxon might not be facing as a big a problem for their American profits as they may have feared (most oil in the US is used for vehicles, not electricity generation).

#2 Good to see a British person seeing the light given the amount of pro-AGW propaganda your government, certain industries and your carbon trading interests have been pushing on you. I speculated you all might take delight seeing that smirking smile on Tony Blair’s face as he hocus-pocused Arnold Schwarzenegger into joining into the new British carbon exchange (French government free…smart!), but your average Brit won’t see any of the benefit, in fact will be paying more “green taxes,” and the EU will be increaing carbon caps in order to try to reinflate the European carbon trading exhange. More, given these taxes and voices like Monckton’s that Gore and his ilk can’t silence there may be more hope that British discourse will destroy the carbon narratives–you got a better sense of mockery than Americans too.

#3 How about CBAAGW, Carbon-Based Anthropogenic Average Global Warming? Unwieldy, sure. As for temperature increase, I don’t know those stats are not infected with urban heat island data. In graphs showing long term increases I never see the effect of solar variations. And every HS must be analyzed for “year shaving” (please invent a better term!) That is, selective starting points that omit data from earlier years that although would give greater context, would decrease the evidence of warming, eg. if temp. data started in 1889 there very well may be temp data before 1889 showing higher temps.

As for “global warming” I doubt you will ever hear Al Gore say those two words again. “Climate change” has replaced it over the past few months among the civilians speaking about it publicly, as certainly ordered by the PR firms orchestrating the talking points, legislation proposals, and directed publicity for favorable studies. Why, not sure. Maybe the PR firms focus-grouped the term “global warming” on public samples and found it raised giggles. Also, new scientists can be coopted who would otherwise not sign up, feeling comfortable with mouthing the words “climate change.” Of course the climate changes all the time, but the core advertising reality is most people, and politicians I would think too, equate the denotation of “global warming” with “climate change.”

FtM – I am a Welshman living in Ireland these last sixteen years, twelve of those on an island without amenities, no piped water, no electricity. Our eco credentials are of some importance to my wife and I. However,everything in our modern world is subject to compromise even when you try to turn away from consumerism, you load the responsibilty on someone else. I consider carbon trading as a deliberate attempt to make someone else pay for your folly – it’s a monumental scam and also distracts from the do-able practical things that can be corrected to ease any effect of ‘climate change.
I also have nothing but contempt for modelling – only physicists and cosmologists should practice it where theory and handwaving don’t clash with politics in the wider world.
I do believe we are heating up, the natural world indicates a change. But sea level rise – no. Panic, people love a horror story but as I have started to say to the panic stricken = ‘It’s the weather,stupid!’

Pat Frank #3 posted. 1 “¢’¬? “the facts are clear that global warming is here, now.” Laurie David is literally right. It is pretty clear that things have warmed up since about 1880 or so, though by how much is not so clear.

It is interesting that most of our temperature records start in 1880, 1881 or 1885. The climate was still coming out of the Little Ice Age at the time.

And in 1883, the Kraktoa volcanoe blew up which had large effects on global temperatures for several years.

“In the year following the eruption, average global temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius. Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888.”

So if temps have increased by 0.6C since 1883, but temperatures fell by 1.2C after Krakatoa, what does that say about picking the starting point and data selection. What happens if we pick 1940 as the starting point.

Dear Steve, as a climate statistician, you may want to look at these interesting papers about the frequency of record-breaking temperatures for a given day and whether the frequency of these events as a function of time may reveal a trend.

#3, Do we in fact know that the world has heated up? We know what the temperature gauge says, but what effect has land use change onear the recording device had? How reliable are the older records. As has been shown with the hurricane trends, the monitoring has improved dramatically, which at first glance of the results would seem to indicate an increase, yet perhaps it is mostly or totally due to increased surveillance, and not an actual increase in tropical activity.

Now, of course, we know the world heats up and cools down some amount from our observations, and if we agree that the world was coming out of the LIA around the late 1800’s as stated in #7 and our “reliable” record keeping occurred around the same time, then the world probably is “warming”, although to what degree is in question. So if looking at it from that viewpoint, then the speaker may have been “literally correct”.

As to when they say global warming they mean AGW, that’s true in a rather broad expanse. There are many different effects the “a” in AGW might have. Land-use changes may be the biggest, but that’s clearly not what they mean when they say global warming. What they are referring to specifically is CO2 based AGW. They deliberately speak in a way that does not clearly delineate exactly what they mean, allowing the general public to hear nice “sound bytes” on the news and not understand the implications of what these people intend to occur with their “solutions”. It doesn’t help that the media has made it sound as though the earth has some happy equilibrium and that big oil is scewing up the earth for all humanity. It’s all such a crock.

#3, “Boudreux said Exxon in 2006 stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit advocating limited government regulation, and other groups that have downplayed the risks of greenhouse emissions. ” and “Exxon’s funding action was confirmed this week by its vice president for public affairs. Kenneth Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that Exxon decided in late 2005 that its 2006 nonprofit funding would not include CEI and “five or six” similar groups.”

So it’s not just a flak pushing CO2 is good for you. My guess is it’s 5 or 6 now, and the rest soon enough, as more pressure is applied to Exxon and other companies. Give an inch and they’ll ask for a mile.

In response to FTW’s kind comments about the British, I am afraid that, at least in public life, the upper hand is with the AGW brigade. The majority of the media have long since given up on any attempt at rationale analysis of the CC scam. This includes the ‘heavyweights’ such as The Economist and the FT, whose senior economic/polictical columnists wrote articles late last year with the famous ‘global warming science is decided’ theme and accepting the idea that anyone let alone an economist (Stern) can predict what will happen 50-100 years into the future. In a rare exception last Tuesday, one of its regular independent columnists, Professor John Kay had the courage to describe AGW as a religion but the next day there were four letters contradicting him with the usual AGW myths. Even the Spectator (a generally ‘right wing’ publication) published a ‘green’ supplement complete with David Cameron (Leader of the Opposition) blaming the Katrina deaths on AGW. In a similar vein, a Speccy editorial actually said that 1% of emissions were caused by TVs and other elcetrical gadgets on standby, a numerical impossibility.

As for the BBC, its policy on AGW/CC appears to be directed by Greenpeace/FOE whose propoganda is accepted without any challenge or analysis. There have been two exceptions, one Radio 4 programme that dealt with a number of AGW myths, e.g. various rare species going extinct becase of GW, and a series called More or Less on Radio 4 which does challenge some of the numbers. But this is nothing against a tidal wave of AGW hype. Indeed, of all the activity at the AGU, the BBC only covered the hysterical polar ice cap melting session which I recall was based on 4 years numbers. Again, a recent report that showed the waste that is wind power – in effect they only generate at about 30% capacity and not at all when there is no wind – was only covered by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph. Not a mention on the BBC.

New Scientist should be called New Scaremonger. The only papers regularly puting the sceptics’ view are the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail. Asregular subscribers to CA will know, the ST published the articles by Viscount Monckton trashing Gore/AIT and by no less than Steve M on the ‘hockey stick’. Even then, both are still inconsistent in their reporting of AGW propoganda and it is clear that the journos on the ST’s sister paper, the Daily T do not read the ST.

We have a government that is full on PC with AGW, is about to drive home a huge windfarm in the Thames Estuary, red Ken Livinstone, so called Mayor for London, leading a vitriolic campaign against 4x4s or Chelsea Tractors as they are known here, supported by various councils who intend to levy penal parking charges against them. We have government adverts that say you can save ‘up to’ $80 a year by turning off the telly instead of leaving it on standby, another numerical impossibilty. Then there are the manic recycling campaigns driven by EU legislation, with local councils spying on your rubbish, fining you if you put the wrong waste into the wrong bin and so on. We even now have the CBI – big business trade assocn – forming a committee of the great and the good to advise business how it can combat CC. And there is the President of the Royal Society criticising Exxon for funding sceptic groups on the basis the ‘science is decided’ and ‘a global consensus of scientists…..’

In my own industry, insurance, the public conventional wisdom fully supports apocalyptic CC causing rising sea levels leading to catatrophic flooding and more hurricanes etc etc. Nowhere is there any rational analysis nor mention of the actual warming given by the Third IPCC.

I’m sorry about the rant which no doubt will be boring to the regulars on this site but it underlines how important it is. To echo Aileni Noyle, what would really help the non-scientists and mathmaticians like myself would be a regular ‘idiots guide and glossary’ that would make it easier to follow some of the more abstruse threads dealing with the stats of proxies. A really dumb but obvious question is why so much statistical analysis has to be applied to what are ‘observations’. I know this may be tedious to the eggheads but if we are to make any progress in taking the argument to the AGW propogandists, we will need to use language that is accessible to well educated but non-scientific people.

I sit on a committee in the London Insurance Market that organises lunctime lectures on insurance related issues. To counter a session we had early in 2006 that was full on ‘we are all doomed’, we will be hosting a lecture, provisionally titled GW – Myths and Reality, some time later this year or early next. As we have no funds to pay for speakers fees or travel, I have tried to find a UK based scientist/meteorologist/climatologist to speak but have struggled. Fortunately, Viscount Monckton has volunteered but if anyone out there has a better suggestion, I would be pleased to hear it. You can contact me direct on pmaynard@pmaynard.plus.com or maynardpg@willis.com. Other London based CA readers are welcome to contact me anyway.

Loki,
You SoCal types make me laugh. It was 7 degrees F here in Minnesota this morning, and I was just glad that it was not colder. Below zero lows are not uncommon at all at this time of the year. It’s amazing what people can get used to, eh?

I am chuckling thinking about when some sarcastic paper will be published that blames greenhouse warming on the proliferation of …. greenhouses. All those millions of automobies enclosed in glass with the sun shining in acting as little solar heaters. All added up it would be acres of real greenhouse set out every day and exposed to the sun where they warm the air. And those little cooling fans they sell out here that slip into the window stripping to exhaust the hot air just making the problem even worse by drawing yet more air into the greenhouses to be warmed. There must be what … 300 million of these greenhouses, each one a solar heater, sitting in various places in the world.

Is Viscount Monckton going to be using the “chinese in the arctic” argument? Or perhaps the ‘Greenland farms are all under permafrost” argument? Or perhaps the “I got a different answer by ignoring atmospheric vertical profiles and assuming all feedbacks and time lags are realized, so the climate scientists are all incompetent and are ignoring Stefan-Boltzman” argument?

Re 19: Monkton withdrew the ‘chinese in the arctic’ remark once he realised it was apocryphal. The Viking settlement failure due to increasing cold is, I believe, a fact. Strange nobody has mentioned Vinland – apparently it was very warm up around Labrador once upon.
I agree with Paul M – Brit papers and the Beeb are in the hysterical zone – and very regretably, so is the New Scientist where the concensus seems to be that modellers are the bees’ knees.
All the more reason for a little sanity.

I expect Monckton to be honest about the limits to his knowledge and self-effacing about some of his more zealous comments. These are not features that I have seen infect any of the AGW hysterical brigade including Al Gore who has made no apology for the many manifest mispreresentations in AIT.

I might ask him to eschew the arcain debates about paleo climatology and ask him to look at the historical record. The Little Ice Age is well recorded acorss Europe in everything from ice fairs on the River Thames to reduced crop yields. To my knowledge, the Thames has not frozen in the recent past. The reason it did freeze is nothing to do with Mr Mann’s gyrations about river flow and everything to do with the fact that it was cold.

I might ask him to consider scientific arrogance and the loss of the scientific method (except of course on this site)and in this respect I could commend you and other readers to a book by Dr James Le Fanu called the Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine. What has this got to do with CC – nothing. What has it to do with scientific arrogance – everything.

LF explains with clarity the huge body of ‘science’ that was constructed to explain stomach and duodenal ulcers from stress to diet that was demolished with the discovery, to initial derision by the medical establishment, of the bacteria that caused ulcers. Or the social theory of medicine with its obsession with diet and social factors as causes of disease but with no scientific or factual basis. Or the fact that contrary to public perception, we still do not understand how the cell works and the cause of hundreds of diseases. Or the fraud that is Freudian psychoanalysis. Or finally, the irony of Richard Doll who published the Causes of Cancer in 1982, a book that established the low base point for the modern pseudo science of epidemeology and debased the work of his mentor, Sir Austin Bradford Hill who discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer and who (Doll) is now being villified post mortem for taking money from evil business.

Ye gods, just had to stop watching the boy Cameron on breakfast telly -‘… the problem with global warming is the price for carbon..’ as he wriggled about ‘carbon’ taxes on gas guzzlers and taxation of air travel. Yes, perhaps I’ll ask VM to talk about the disastrous impact of this tomfoolery on our economy.

I’ve lost count now how many times Lee has brought up Monckton’s mistaken mention of an apparently Apocryphal Chinese voyage to the Arctic, and each time someone has told him that Monckton acknowledged the mistake and withdrew it.

Re the upcoming IPCC report. I have not checked into it but it came up in a conversation last night as well as Russian Icebreakers. Does anyone know how many paoers have been submitted? And the next question – are they all indicating Warming or AGW?

I’m with you re the New Scientist — they seem to have forgotten scientific objectivity and bang on and on about climate change. It’s a great shame that they can’t keep cool and just run over the facts of the case.

A little over a year ago I started to get rather worried about global warming and read around a little — the hockey stick is a great attention grabber. So far I’ve got to the stage where I think warming is actually happening, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s human emissions that are the cause of the trouble.

As an exercise I set out to produce an explanation of the problem different from the norm and I found it disturbingly easy. But a merely convincing narrative is not enough in science, it needs to be tested against fact. I’ve had responses which tell me that the current narrative is proved and that we know where the problem comes from. This is an asserted fact.

Could some kind person please tell me how we can say with scientific certainty that the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is the stuff we are burning? Is there enough knowledge of other sources to say that eg methanophages in the deep ocean haven’t upped their CO2 production by 100 Gt per year and swamped the usual sequestration systems of the Earth? Or that there has been a plankton die off caused by pesticide pollution? Or tens of other explanations?

The big issue with the forthcoming IPCC report is whether scientists will allow egregious politicisation and misrepresentation of their work in the Summary For Policymakers that occurred in TAR.

Can I suggest that the first thing to do on release of the FAR is for scientists, both those involved with the IPCC and those who are not, to check that the Summary for Policymakers is an accurate summary of the papers making up the body of the work. If not, can I suggest that it is vital that the scientists protest in the most vocal and visible way about the continuing politicisation and misrepresentation of science.

The credibility of science, and especially the climate scientists, has been badly damaged by the SFP of TAR, and the poor quality work presented by the Hockey Team. Scientists must stand up and be counted on this stuff.

For fun, here’s my prediction for the global temperature anomaly in 2007: I forecast that the 2007 anomaly will be less than the +0.54C reported for 2006.

What’s the basis for this? Well, the NCDC correlator shows that global temperature is correlated with Indo-Pacific Warm Pool SST (the atmosphere’s furnace) and with central Pacific SST (the PDO fingerprint region). There is also a relation between global temperature and ENSO (El Nino / La Nina) behavior.

The July-Dec Warm Pool SST ended up 2006 about 0.2C below the 2001-2005 average (quite a drop) and the central Pacific currently shows evidence of a cool phase PDO. El Nino is fading towards a neutral position.

I am betting on persistence, with these late 2006 tendencies continuing well into 2007.

Samuel Pepys (London-based diarist) experienced an unusually warm early winter in 1661/62:
On 26 Jan 1662, he said:
“It having been a very fine clear frosty day-God send us more of them!”¢’¬? for the warm weather all this winter makes us fear a sick summer.”
John Evelyn (another diarist of the time, who tended to provide more detail on weather) said in Jan 1662::
“there having falln so greate raine without any frost or seasonable cold …like May or June”.

This is very similar to what we are seeing in Europe now (I am currently in Belgium, but UK weather very similar). I had lunch in the sun in my garden yesterday (14 Jan!). Interestingly, the following winter (1661/62) was much colder, when ice-skating was introduced in England, Charles II watching it on the frozen Thames.

(Dates: England at that time had not switched to the ‘new-style’ calendar (removing 11 days to deal with slippage), so that date is equivalent to about 6th Feb in current system).

Re 25 (bruce)
When the dire predictions fail to come true, the current AGW advocates will not admit any mistake. One of two things will happen:
1. The politicians will blame the experts (ie. the scientists) for getting it wrong (where has that happened before?).
or
2. It will be concluded that ‘global dimming’ is overtaking ‘global warming’. This will be blamed on air borne polllution. A new panic of global cooling will then begin. Global dimming is already believed by some, in that it is preventing the world from warming as fast as it would.

I have been reading this forum for some time, and, like mentioned above, I am
impressed with the level of discourse.

As a humble science undergrad, I don’t have the background to really particpate
in the discussion, but then again, neither does Gore or David Suzuki and it doesn’t seem
to slow them down much.

One thing which has stuck me is that the GHG Global Warming hypothesis
seems to confuse correlation with causation, which was once such a
cardinal sin it was drummed into us constantly. So, the way I figure it,
somebody figured it is getting warmer and look around to find a reason for
it. Since human development and industrialization is continuing apace a whole
lot of thing probably correlate with development, whether or not development
actually caused them.

I have developed an alternative theory. The other night two of my
three cats sat on my lap. I immediately noticed I get heating up, and this
got me thinking: there are a lot more domestic cats around today than there
has ever been. In fact, as I understand it, domestic cats were worshipped
in ancient Egypt, and that was a very hot place. During the late Middle
Ages, cats were thought responsible for the plague and exterminated in Europe.
This explains the Little Ice Age.

So, I am pretty sure that the population rise in domestic cats can be correlated
to tempterature, possible better than CO2 can be.

PHE,
What is interesting is that the 17th Century was the coldest Century of the LIA. In 1666,
England suffered a 6 month Spring/Summer drought with surface temps hitting 35 deg C.
The Great London fire occured in Sept of that year, and it was followed by a Winter so cold
that the Oak trees in the Midlands split open. In the Autumn of 1649 the remnants of an
Atlantic Hurricane passed over London giving it its lowest ever recorded surface pressue along
with 100mph winds.

During that same period, the worst drought ever to hit NAmerica was coming to a close, but
not before it claimed all of the Roanoke Settlers, and most of the Jamestown Settlers.

RE Mingy (32). If you are just ‘a humble science undergrad’ (and not just winding us up), I suggest the following. Read the IPCC TAR reports (as much as you can handle anyway, and focus on the historical stuff, not the predictions). Then read the Summary for Policy Makers and see how much of the key statements are backed up by the ‘science’ in the rest of the report. The most key statements are: (1)”It is likely that the rate and duration of the warming of the 20th century is larger than any other time during the last 1000 years.” and (2) “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is atributable to human activities.” The first is based on the hockey-stick, which Steve McIntyre has demonstrated to be fiddled statistics, and the 2nd is derived from computer modelling, which is too dependent on assumptions and the competence of the modeller to be considered any kind of proof. Without these, the ‘scientific consensus’that the end of the world is nigh is pretty weak. Your analogy with cats is very relevant. The only problem is it is not sufficiently plausible. What drives the AGW argument is causation plus a plausible theory. It is also helped by cherry-picked anecdotes. The limitation that the so-called skeptics see is the absence of convincing evidence to solidly back up the theory.

With regard to whether you are up to the job of making your own judgement, the most important qualification for a scientist is that you must be convinced yourself by the arguments presented. It is not enough to simply accept the conclusions of an ‘expert’. There are far too many ‘science correspondents’ who are able to read and then summarise a scientific paper or report in a convincing manner, but without any genunine comprehension on their own part.

Hey, it’s warming up here, already 18 in the Springs. That’s a far cry warmer than it’s been the past several days (many single digit highs in the past 5 days). Unfortunately, it seems the warm winter in the midwest and east coast have ended, replaced with ice storms and frigid temps. I’m just happy we didn’t get another blizzard after the last storm rolled through (4 inches or so, but insanely cold). In typical el Nino fashion, the southern mountains are getting pounded. Wolf Creek got 4′ in the last 72 hours. I need to get my butt down there for a whirl in the powder! 😉

With regard to whether you are up to the job of making your own judgement, the most important qualification for a scientist is that you must be convinced yourself by the arguments presented. It is not enough to simply accept the conclusions of an “expert’. There are far too many ‘science correspondents’ who are able to read and then summarise a scientific paper or report in a convincing manner, but without any genunine comprehension on their own part.

I was in an email debate with a lawyer from San Diego, CA, the other day. He informed me that he was “only interested in the facts” and went on to cite Al Gore’s recent movie as his source of information. He then proceeded to chide me for not seeing the movie itself (I’m not interested in propaganda I replied, I prefer to reference Al’s sources), but failed to note whether he had actually followed up on any of Al’s claims, as if the movie were “fact” enough. Hehe, science is lost on even the most educated in our society. There was literally no way to convince him that following up on the facts should be required before making any claims to the efficacy of Al’s movie.

Thanks for your suggestions. I plan on trying to read those things, but I am a little concerned they may be like some of the other papers (i.e. from Nature) on other subjects like diabetes, etc., which are so wound up with terminology a lay person can understand them. I’ll never understand why folk feel that a $20 word has to be used when a $0.50 will do just fine.

Of course, my cats theory is all in jest. However, when I read about ‘forcing’ and such like, I can’t help but be reminded that it sounds like adjusting the coefficients to fit the data, rather than using the data to confirm the range of coefficients suggested by theory.

I know a little bit about computer modeling, and, above all I recall the first thing is that a model tells you nothing about nature, but nature sure tells you whats wrong with your model.

So, I just don’t understand why anything in a climate theory should need ‘forcing’. Square pegs need to be forced into round holes, and maybe there is a lesson there. I can’t understand why a model of a incredibly complex chaotic system would even include heuristic paramters. I work in the finance industry. I know very smart people who try and write stock picking programs (the stock market is also believed chaotic) and they fiddle with all their parameters all the time and their predictions immediately diverge from reality once they start forecasting, even though ‘backcasting’ works real well.

I find the whole global warming debate reminds me of the whole Y2K fiasco: lots of ‘experts’ squalking about the end fo the world, and counter opions were shouted down. Thats one big reason I became a ‘skeptic’, which doesn’t me denier, at least not to me, but it means ‘show me’.

In the GW business, ‘show me’ is answered by ‘trust me’, which doesn’t cut it. Up above is mentioned ulcers as an example of scientific arogance, but there are many others. There is so much we don’t know, and so much to learn.

And why do people keep their data & algorithms secret? I have never heard of such a thing before! How can a paper based on secret data, etc., pass peer review? I really can’t get my mind around that question. How can anybody take a scientist seriously when he bases a conclusion on data and models which he won’t publicly disclose?

But, I’ll try and keep up!

ps: meant to say I have a BSc (undergrad science degree), not to imply that I am still in school.

Well as I expected, this event was about on par with our late 1998 early 1999 event here in California (albeit, sans precipitation this time). Low temps in the same ball park. Woe to citrus growers, as I am sure you have heard from the news. But not as bad as the late 1990 early 1991 event. No grease ice on the SF Bay this time …

A couple of interesting asides …

Friday I spent the day in the Central Sierra skiing and walking. We are having a dryish, cold and windy year and the snow and ice forms tell that story. I’ll have some things to comment on vis a vis alpine glaciers when I get some time in a few days.

Also, the conditions back down here in the coastal lowlands and uplands have allowed me to witness what is going on with small patches of ice that have formed in various places. In fact, I’ve been making day by day observations of one on my road, in a shady spot, that has been slowly sublimating away (it has not reached the melting point due to the shade). More to come …. 😉

What’s interesting is to watch snow/ice melt when the temperatures are at or below ZERO, simply because the sun is out. My wife shoveled the driveway the other day (I was in bed, so yes, slacking), and the driveway was literally steaming in the sun, even though the temp at the time was about 2F. We were both actually rather warm standing there (no wind). Our son, of course, was delirious with joy that he could play in the snow. We had to drag him into the house screaming after his cheeks got red.

In the UK, when we had the foot and mouth disease crisis about 5 years ago, literally millions of
healthy cattle were incinerated on huge pyres across the country. This was all based upon a computer
model that claimed to be able to predict the spread of the disease. No details ofthe model have ever
been made public and thus it has never been subject to any form of testing, audit or public review.
Why? No doubt, the government and the deviser of the model would find this all too embarrasing.
The F&M epidemic, but most importantly, the cullings, had a measurable effect on the rural economy and
destroyed many livelyhoods, probably for nothing. This is what will happen when the modellers are
not subject to exhaustive and objective public analysis.

Your cat theory is completely wrong as it lacks the ability to explain the apparent rise of temperature before CO2 increases in ice core bubbles from past warming events, the light isotope signal in the atmosphere and … well, lots of stuff. (caveat: you never know with cats, though.)

I will now display the system of the world.

In 1850 the artificial dye mauve is invented and kick-starts the petrochemical industry. The pollutants spew out into the rivers of the industrialising world and prove less bio-degradeable than the naturally occuring compounds which up to then were the only restrictions on the free movement of the surface layer. The surface smooths. Tide detergent is invented and things get worse as this is very tough for normal bacteria to degrade. Oil sheen and surfactant pollution spread over the oceans and have the following effects: they reduce the formation of hygroscopic nuclei (the reduced wave-breaking physically lowering the amount of mechanical mixing and hence CO2 absorbtion); reduce upwelling by lowering evaporation rates and hence nutrient flow to the surface; lower nutrient flows reduce biological pull down of CO2; produce smaller waves with smoother profiles which couple less strongly with the wind and hence slow mainly wind-driven ocean currents. Lack of nuclei reduces the amount of low level stratocumulus over the oceans, albedo falls and the surface warms slightly, exacerbating the stability, reducing upwelling, lowering biological breakdown of the offending oil sheen and surfactants. The cycle turns.

The phytoplankton respond: starved of nutrients, in particular zinc and chromium, many switch to C4 or CAM metabolisms which are less efficient at fractionating the heavier isotopes of carbon. C4 phyto species gain a competitive advantage as they need less zinc and chromium and can operate more efficiently in the warmer — and hence less CO2 rich — surface waters and they increase in numbers. The phytoplankton now incorporate more heavy isotopes. More 13C and 14C is rained out of the upper surfaces of the ocean and the atmospheric isotopic C signal goes lighter, signalling an erroneous level of unsequestered fossil fuel emissions. In ten thousand years, scientists will interpret the reduced 14C signal as lesser age and will puzzle over the problem of temperature rise preceding CO2 elevation.

Deep ocean temperatures increase and methanophages devour more hydrate: CO2 levels rise and, as the cycle iterates, runaway greenhouse ensues when deep temperatures boil off the methane. Nothing like this has happend for 55 million years when the breaching of a major light oil reservoir triggered the same sequence.

There is no need to stop driving your van, but stop washing it: make sure that it is oil-tight and that used oil is burnt rather than poured away as half the spilled oil on the ocean comes down the sewers. Shampoo less, use bio-degradable washing powder.

RE: #43 – That is very interesting. Did a bit of work with stress reducers and surfactants vis a vis permalloy plating 20 years ago. Some such compounds are quite persistent innately. Good area of further study.

43: I suspect that natural sources of oils and chemicals far exceed what we are dumping into the ocean, but then I don’t know…We are finding that bacteria can break down virtually any organic compounds, natural or synthetic.

This comment of mine over at RC has been censored. The comment was a brief mention of the following information.

This Web site, for professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert at the University of Chicago, has a link to this site. The HTML source for the latter site has this as the title tag, “DubyaWatch.org — George Bush’s War on the Environment”.

I have submitted the following as a response to the cersorship.

re: #56. Well, this becomes more and more curious. A search shows all my comments are still here. And, more importantly, comment #56 proves that RC does in fact censor comments. In this case, a completely true statement regarding the use of a well-known characterization of a prominent political person by one of the founding members of the RealClimate Web site has been censored. The URL of the Web site maintained by that founder has been censored. And the well-known characterization has been censored.

Maybe raypierre would like to provide some additional information and bring some openness to the RC site.

Apparently he is not kidding. Shrug. There is no requirement for you to respond to each and every post or comment, so what’s it to you?

Furthermore, while your colorful use of pseudo-swearing adds to the word count of your posts, it adds little to any dialogue and confirms in my view that you deliberately tread as close as possible to the censoring line so that you can in turn make the same complaint against the maintainers of this site. If you are so emotionally charged that you cannot post without this pseudo-swearing, perhaps you should give yourself a 5-minute egg timer.

Earle, CA also has a no-politics rule, and routinely censors posts with political content, much less posts attempting to start a political fight.

Raypierre has a web page that is not RC, with a link to another web page, and it is damaging-to-RC censorship when RC doesn’t let through a comment on this? That is an absurd enough statement to trigger a comment.

#52. I agree that this is not a particularly egregious example of RC censorship. These blogs all have a centrifugal tendency as many posters want to insert political digs and I can see why they might want to nip this line of arguing.

Worrying about this deflects attention from the more serious censorship of scientific comments at rc.

Re my #23. I did not get all the info I wanted.
1. Are papers solicited by IPCC or just submitted?
2. Is there a listing of the submitted papers that is accessible?
3. How many papers were submitted to the current IPCC?

re: #48, 52 and others. Maybe I’m seeing this all wrong, so here is a more nearly complete summary. In #12 in the thread over on RC Mike responded by opening with this, “[Response: Your reference to “Algore” is a red flag right up front with regard to your objectivity.”

I tried to point out that professor Pierrehumbert has a Web site on which he refers to President Bush as ‘Dudya’ and additionally that site has the title, “DubyaWatch.org — George Bush’s War on the Environment”.

If the leaders of RC can state that use of the word ‘Algore’ immediately rasies a red flag relative to objectivity, why can’t the readers of RC be informed of the true fact that one of the founders of RC does exactly the very same thing. Only in spades. It is very explictily evident that professor Raypierrehumbert very likely brings a political bias to the RC table.

Additionally, Mike states that I have been labeled a troll and all my comments at RC have been removed. This is easily proved to be wrong with this search.

So, why can’t the readers of RC be also informed that Mike’s response to me is wrong.

With respect to RC, there’s no point getting into the details of any particular argument, you’ll never win. What’s intresting is the overall picture. Its quite easy to find the comments that do not support the RC case. Its the ones with the green responses. I merit that the site admits many more ‘skeptic’ points of view than they used to. This is positive. However, many of these get a green response which either (i) belittles the poster in some way, or says (ii) that your argument is pointless because ‘we’ve already discussed it ‘here” – as if discussion represents a proof. Its quite amusing really. Instead of trying to win the argument, you can measure success in two ways. First, getting any response at all is a win. And second, the more petty and petulant the response, the more you know you have hit a nerve. Censorship of course is another matter, but the art is not to provoke them into this, but to keep challenging them in more subtle ways. By the way, I haven’t used my usual name, as I don’t want to trigger censorship on myself!

I’m just a lurker in this site and really enjoy reading all the posts here but have a problem with the large number of acronyms. I’ve look for a FAQ or Glossary but no luck. Here is my list, so far, with definitions that I think are correct but would like validation. Also, I’d appreciate any corrections, additions, updates, etc.

Dan, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert’s truly wierd pages are here. Moreover, those pages are full of spelling mistakes 😉 [Raymond, “Revontuli” is singular, “Revontulet” is plural. The band is Vàƒ⣲ttinàƒ⢼/a>, etc]

Seriously, I don’t see the point why you need to refer to his Bush pages over RC. Anyone with a half of a brain can find those pages, and, IMO, those pages really do not have anything to do with RC. Actually, IMO, it is a respectable thing that he is linking to those pages in the main page – so he is kind of playing with open cards.

In discussion of Gore’s film, a commenter complained that he ignored the consensus that in palaeo times, temperature changes preceeded CO2 changes. For anyone who saw the film, as did I, this refers to the most dramatic part of the film.
He shows the paleao-temp and CO2 curves (one above the other, not superimposed), showing how closely they mirrored each other. He then shows the ‘dramatic’ rise in CO2 in recent times, it going so far off the scale, he has to go up in a builder’s lift to point to the top. Now, Gore never claimed that temperature followed CO2. But neither did he explain that CO2 followed temperature. The whole impact of the moment was based on implying temp followed CO2. This is certainly what the audience was led to believe. To argue this was not a deceit is a joke. But read the RC response:

“Response: If the argument was simply that CO2 and temp are correlated in the past and therefore that temperatures will rise if CO2 does, you would be correct. However, this is not what is claimed by either the scientific community nor Al Gore. The statements in AIT are that the CO2 and temperature curves ‘fit’ and that the relationship is complex, but causal in both directions. This is based not just on Vostok curves themselves, but from tons of ancilliary evidence that demonstrates that CO2 (and methane and N2O) changes explain just under half the temperature changes seen in the glacial records. The pacemaker for the ice ages is the insolation variability due to orbital forcings, which are amplified by GHG feedbacks. Thus good correlations are to be expected, as are slight lags in CO2. – gavin”

Seriously? They said that? I may lack science credentials, but I know a bit about electroncs.

A relationship which is causal in both directs creates a feedback loop. A positive feedback loop goes to saturation.

If the CO2/Temp relationship involves negative feedback (by the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if it does – nobody seems to talk
about the impact of the ocean carbon cycle as a buffer), then there is nothing to worry about.

If the relationship is positive earth would have ‘gone venus’ (or the opposite) a few billion years ago.

RE: #40 – RE: Sublimation of ice. As mentioned, I observed ~ 6 days of sublimating hard ice on my road. The scenario – Siberia Express door opened Thursday night (11 Jan). Some standing water about 1 inch deep along the side of the road froze solid. It was in a shady spot and never was able to melt. I made daily observations. RH% was quite low (10 – 20%). Winds were blowing moderately. Final result – no ice left after just shy of six days but there was never a drop of liquid water to be seen. Now, food for thought – what might this imply about alpine glacier loss mechanisms? More on that score in a few days …

Texas continues to be hammered by the remnants of an ice storm that is blamed for as many as 54 deaths in nine states. On Tuesday, sleet and snow forced Texas officials to cancel Gov. Rick Perry’s inaugural parade and move the governor’s inauguration ceremony indoors for the first time in a half-century. The ice storm forced police to close hundreds of miles of highways, including numerous overpasses and the upper deck of Interstate 35 through downtown Austin, Texas.

#67
Steve S., an extremely important point that underlines how the focus on temperature and CO2 has prevented consideration of many other variables. Some are left out as of no siginificance, but as thresholds change they can become very significant. For example a few years ago the forecast for crop yields was low in western Canada because of low rainfall. The crop came in average or above average and everyone was perplexed. I examined several stations throughout the region and discovered that condensation in the month of August delivered at least 50 millimeters (2 inches) of moisture. This was not counted in the official records of moisture available yet is enough to ‘fill out’ a crop. More important it is delivered at night when evaporation is low, it is more widely and evenly spread than rainfall, is eliveerd right at the gorund or tothe plant leaves were it drips to the ground for more efficient infiltration. The temperature conditions saw daytime highs of 26° to 29°C and nightitme lows of 3° to 5°C, indeed in some places record nightime lows were recorded.

The same is true of moisture lost through sublimation. Incidentally, in the journals of the Hudson’s Bay Company weather observations distinguish between “melting in the sun” and “metling in the shade” yet this was long before knowledge about radiation. People have a hard time with concepts that are outside of the simplistic science they learn in school – the science of absolutes for young logical positivists. Freezing and melting points are absolute, so nothing melts below freezing. The other one they have problems with is supercooled water, that is water in liquid form well below freezing temperatures. Because of lack of experience with cold temperatues most British science was not familiar with the processes. The Royal Society was surprised when the mercury in the thermometers they sent to Churchill stiffened and then froze at -39°C and Thomas Hutchens carried out experiments on the freezing of mercury at Fort Albany under their instructions. Unfortunately, they created confusion by naming the change of phase of water from a gas to a solid or from a solid to a gas both as sublimation.

I found the concept of moisture loss from a frozen surface was easier for Arts students taking a mandatory science course if I talked about an everday experience, namely the oxymoron “freezer burn”.

Moisture loss by sublimation takes a great deal of energy, but is dramatically increased by wind speed just as it is for water evaporation. Farmers struggle with moisture loss from the frozen ground even if there is snow cover. As the snow begins the nivation process from snowflakes to ice a stage named granular snow, pore space increases, air movement and subilimation loss increase significantly directly from the granules but also from the soil surface.

Wind speeds around very small alpine glaciers such as the Athabasca glacier in Alberta are increased by cold air drainage (Katabatic Flow). They are very dramtic around large ice saps. For example, the average wind speed at Cape Denison in Antarctica is 70 kph (43 mph or 19 m/s) while Mawson’s Base has above gale force wind (44 kph or 28 mph) about 340 days a year. I recall battling very strong winds flying into the military base at Thule in Greenland.

RE: #75 – For what it’s worth, I personally consider anothe world war far more likely than “killer AGW.” Even the most cursory review of history, coupled with a neutral assessment of human nature, would say I’m right. It’s almost as if “killer AGW” is a sort of combined subconcious and wilful distraction from things that are currently far more grave, in absolute terms. For many in the Western intelligentsia, it is likely driven by a subconscious desire not to face issues raised but due to embrace of naive childish utopianism not truly resolved last century. For certain others elsewhere, it may be more in the wilful category.

BTW – for anyone suspecting I may be a crank, doomer or bunker dweller, my view is informed by (but not limited to) the likes of: Descartes, Burke, Burkhardt, Camus, Nietzsche, Arendt, not to forget Von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.

Truth is, worrying about the impacts of “bad Western developed exploitive wealthy arrogant humanity” is a safe place to dwell if one does not want to face what some notably great thinkers challenged us with in the past as well as what some people who are the antithesis of Western liberal modernity have in mind for the Planet Earth.

Heights got lower as the storm moved south, our snow level up here in the high 30s N latitude was 1K feet. Not only is snow at sea level in NWestern LA county remarkable due to being at sea level, but also, the marine influence there is strong. This storm will cause a high pain level if it ends up sweeping the country from the SW to NE. Maybe it is the core of the memorable nor’easter I wagered … 😉

Today, I couldn´t believe my own eyes. On the front page of the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten was a picture of Al Gore stating that he refused to meeting with Bjàƒⷲn Lomborg.
Al Gore had an appointment with the editor of the newspaper for an interview about his film
the Inconvenient Thruth. But yesterday the interview was cancelled via his English agency, Wylie
Agency in London. The reason for their cancelling was that Al Gore did not want the presence of
Mr. Bjàƒⷲn Lomborg during the interview as it was intended. According to the newspaper Al Gore now
accepted to do the interview with the editor Flemming Rose only. But that too was cancelled.
Now Al Gore did not want to do the interview because Flemming Rose in the first
place wanted to make the interview together with Bjàƒⷲn Borg.
What a complete joke he is.

Lag in temp change relative to CO2. Does anyone have a good reference attempting to quantify the increase in atmospheric C02 due to decrease of gas solubility in a warmer ocean? The lag time of about 600 years roughly equals the time for deep water turnover.

After a relatively mild day yesterday, the return of dry air from the Western Canadian interior allowed a rapid cool down last night. This morning there was enough black ice to make some of the roads hazardous. None of the frozen solid standing water though, not cold enough for that. Off to a raging start for “2007, the hottest year ever” – 😉

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Climate change over the past two decades has caused Sweden’s tree line to move north at a faster rate than at any time in the past 7,000 years, Swedish researchers have said.

“The tree line has moved by up to 200 meters (656 feet) in some places. Trees have not grown at such high levels for around 7,000 years,” Leif Kullman, a professor at Umeaa University’s department of ecology and environmental science, told AFP Tuesday.

The tree line represents a limit in mountainous, northern and southern latitudes beyond which trees do not grow.

“Recordings began in 1915 but the trend has intensified in the past 15 to 20 years,” Kullman said.

Sweden’s climate in the past 20 years was as mild as it had been some 7,000 years ago, he added.

While some of the change could be explained by natural phenomena such as the reduction in global volcanic activity — allowing more sunlight to warm the Earth — the trend was clearly provoked for the most part by man-made factors.

“We can say that 75 percent of the change is due to the emergence of greenhouse gases,” Kullman said.

As the climate has become milder other plants and animals have ventured further north from their traditional habitat.

“The number of plants and animals in Swedish forests has grown 100 percent in the last 50 years,” Kullman said.

#87
My research showed the tree line in north central Canada moved approximately 200 km and up to 300 km in some areas from 1772 to 1972 or 1 km per year. See “Historical Evidence and Climatic Implications of a Shift in the Boreal Forest Tundra Transition in Central Canada”, Climatic Change 1986, Vol. 7, pp. 218-229. The evidence also showed the tree line had receded from the MWP. Is this comparable to the altitude changes reported in #87?
The treeline is generally coincident with the summer (JJA) 10°C isotherm, although some argue the isotherm is a response to the treeline because of albedo changes, accumulation of snow and reduced wind speeds.

The chart shows rainfall, evaporation, sea surface temperature and upper-ocean heat content (“HC125”, a broad indicator of temperature of the upper ocean) trends for the Pacific part of the Warm Pool. The chart ends in 1998, so it’s not up-to-date, but nevertheless it shows the 20’th century trends.

What interesting to me is the overall trendless nature of the variables. Perhaps the trends are too slight to see.

Sea surface temperature may have some uptrend but contrary to that, Warm Pool heat content may show a slight downtrend. I wonder if that indicates that ocean mixing (warm surface water mixing with cooler subsurface water) has diminished in recent decades.

Another note is the lack of a clear correlation between SST and evaporation. It seems reasonable to expect evaporation to vary directly with temperature (the warmer the water, the faster the evaporation) but winds and humidity must play a major, perhaps dominant, role in ocean evaporation. If that’s true, then I wonder if that argues against the hot-ocean-increases-evaporation-increases-greenhouse effect-increases-hot-ocean runaway global warming scenario.

RE: #92 – RE: “It seems reasonable to expect evaporation to vary directly with temperature (the warmer the water, the faster the evaporation) but winds and humidity must play a major, perhaps dominant, role in ocean evaporation.”

Re #87 How much of this might be due to climate changes and how much to the CO2 fertilizer effect? Saying that “the trend was clearly provoked for the most part by man-made factors” does not tell us how much is due to anthropogenic climate change and how much to the fertilizer effect. Indeed, if it is mainly the latter, one could be much more certain in ascribing the origin to humans.

RE: #94 – I would want to have a detailed inventory of human activities and land use in the vincinity of the treeline, both at present and over the past couple of hundred years. I would also want to have a detailed understanding of current and past fires – especially in terms of frequency and extent of past events. I would also want to have a detailed faunal understanding – current and past species assemblage / population density, any non native incursions, any extinctions, etc, etc.

The (lower) anomaly animation shows the weakening of El Nino (warm colors along the Pacific equator), cooling of the Warm Pool, anomalous cooling of the Atlantic and establishment of a cool-phase PDO. This is weather, not climate, but it’s interesting that all these tend to cool the atmosphere.

The (upper) animation shows the warm area slink southward with the sun. Neat.

Re #83. Flemming Rose and Bjorn Lomborg have an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the Al Gore interview fiasco. Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, is very critical of Gore.
On of Gore’s associates, Laurie David, said in an article in the Washington Post that Gore’s video was compulsory viewing for school children in Norway and Sweden. A Swedish friend has told me that isn’t the case in Sweden. He didn’t know about Norway.

Speaking of school children, my 11 year old is watching AIT in her social studies class here in Virginia. Do any of the bright lights here have any good links to provide a rebuttal to the Gore assertions that would be suitable for a skeptical sixth grader. So far she is not impressed with Gore’s use of the overdramatic and self agrandizement. In her words, why does he always talk about his family and himself?

Maybe there is a need for a children’s book or books that would actually teach science? At this rate there won’t be anyone in 15 years coming out of grad school who even knows what science is.

My sixth grader is also getting a dose of the “consensus” view on AGW in school, and I’ve been wondering exactly what to do about it. So far, she hasn’t been dragged to see AIT, but the upper schools we’re considering for her are dragging their students to see it.

In my limited spare time, I’ve been trying to figure out how to put together a good presentation. I think I’m getting close to one that would be suitable for a high school science class, but I really haven’t figured out how to present the issues well at a sxith grade level.

As I have been perusing sites like this, I have been pasting interesting graphics etc. into my own Powerpoint file. It’s not well organized yet, but it keeps me from forgetting a particularly interesting issue. I hope over the next few months to have something decent that I can share with others.

Regarding the rise in CO2 preceding the increase in temps long ago, realclimate.org has a post on the subject. They say:

This is an issue that is often misunderstood in the public sphere and media, so it is worth spending some time to explain it and clarify it. At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations. These terminations are pronounced warming periods that mark the ends of the ice ages that happen every 100,000 years or so.

Does this prove that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming? The answer is no.

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.

The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.

Does any of that make sense to anyone? If the CO2 was not needed to cause the first 1/6th of the warming, why would anyone assume it was the cause of the final 5/6ths of the warming? Is there something here I’m missing? Or is this just another example of the warmers errant logic?

My bigger problem with this argument is: what stopped the warming? Assume for the sake of argument that CO2 (and maybe methane) were important positive feedback agents in the warming from ice ages. But then why did it stop at about present temperatures time after time? Why didn’t the positive feedback keep warming more and more, getting rid of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets altogether?

Actually, I do find it plausible that there were positive feedback effects in occurence in the transitions to and from ice ages, mainly because no one can find a large external forcing mechanisms. But given that these transitions stopped repeatedly at about the same levels (high and low), these positive feedback mechanisms had to stop being dominant, at least.

As an engineer, the plots from the Vostok core and the like remind me of the response of certain electronic circuits with positive feedback (Schmitt triggers, etc.) A small change in input levels can trigger a fast and large swing in the output response, with the positive feedback dominating during the transition. But the output quickly gets to the point where the positive feedback effect no longer controls the output. In the case of these circuits, the output saturates near the supply voltage rail, which means that technically the negative feedback that stabilizes the power supply is now the dominant controlling factor on the output level.

While I realize that analogies are not proof, they can be illustrative. It seems very probable to me that even if changing CO2 levels were important positive feedbacks during the transitions, they ceased to be significant effects at the end of the transitions. Since we are not presently in such a transition, any argument that the climate had high sensitivity to CO2 (etc.) levels during these transitions seems to have little relevance to our present non-transitional climate state.

#101 Ron, I don’t think you are missing any of it. RC is making the case on the basis of the usual mix-up
between what is possible (CO2 responsible for 5/6 of warming) and what is probable (the original warming factor continues to work).
They are basically saying “we don’t know what started the warming, but we do know that it stopped after 800 years”.
It is meaningless.

In addition, the CO2 rise continued for about the same length of time after coming out of the glacial period, without the temperature rise continuing. This also reduces the chance that CO2 was a major player, or the temperature would have continued to rise …

It’s the usual explanation, “We don’t know what caused it, so it must be CO2”.

I live in Norway. Watching AIT has not yet been made mandatory, but with the current
level of hysteria it may well be soon.

Editors in major newspapers has aired the idea in their columns that their paper
should refuse to print contributions from readers that contradicted or even
questioned that not only AGW, but catastrophic AGW is a fact.

To the best of my knowledge no major newspaper have given ink to discussions
presenting science contradicting this view. The same goes for air time on broadcasting
stations. The only opposing views here in Norway, is from this and similar web sites
that unfortunately are not very well known in Norway.

Take an ancient ice-core bubble. If CO2 levels and temperatures rose together, but the CO2 in the atmosphere at the time of the rise was already depleted in 14C, what would graphs of temperature and CO2 look like with respect to time? They’d be offset. Which way?

If there is a mechanism which selectively depletes the heavier isotopes of carbon when temperatures start to rise, what would be the atmospheric signature today?

In 100,000 yrs, if a scientist took an ice core bubble and analysed it assuming normal isoptope levels, what signals of temperature and CO2 increases would he see and would they be out of phase? If they were to be out of phase, which would rise first?

Re # 98 and #100 – You have to get them to look at both sides of the issue and make a decision. Simply accepting a statement by a prominent politician or scientist is not good enough as we have seen.
Re #87 – Has Kullman actually provided a scientific analysis or just made the statement that man has caused most of the change?

Gerald,
Yes, that’s the obvious, but the devil is in providing the other side of the issue.
Curt,
I think collecting interesting graphics and reports as they come along is a great idea. I told my daughter to jot down a few claims that seemed to grab the attention of her classmates the most and we would research those in particular. Often times I have found if something considered above dispute can be at all shown to be false, people will begin to look a little more closely at other held truths. If the HS is flawed, then what about hurricane frequency? CA provides a great resource to the actual science even if much of it goes over my head.

RE: #103 – “As an engineer, the plots from the Vostok core and the like remind me of the response of certain electronic circuits with positive feedback (Schmitt triggers, etc.) A small change in input levels can trigger a fast and large swing in the output response, with the positive feedback dominating during the transition. But the output quickly gets to the point where the positive feedback effect no longer controls the output. In the case of these circuits, the output saturates near the supply voltage rail, which means that technically the negative feedback that stabilizes the power supply is now the dominant controlling factor on the output level.”

RE: #106 – No one seems to want to have a technical discussion regarding the current mechanisms reponsible for the European drought of Fall 2006 and the zonally dominated current semi wet but warm pattern. Namely, the behavior of the jet stream, the Bermuda High and the Azores High. Blocking patterns related to these are the main direct causals. Whether or not climate change is or is not even relevant remains to be proven. As I know from also living at the Western margin of a continent (in this case, near the west coast of North America) there is a lot of innate variability in weather on west coasts between 30 and 50 N latitude. Some years, the polar jet runs the show and other years the persistent marine semi tropical high pressure centers run it. And when the jet runs it, it matters whether it is zonal or wavy at the synoptic scale. I am a bit disappointed with how much many among the masses in Europe seem to be totally unaware of this. It does not even require scientific training, only simple awareness of the environment and a decent memory. Think back to both the cold and warm winters and back to both the wet and dry years. Yes, fall – winter 2006 – 2007 is probably one of the more rare ones for Europe in living memory. Over 100 or 500 years probably not. Eventually, with a meteorological roll of the dice, these rarer patterns will eventually happen. I wonder what would have been said about this 200 years ago, prior to AGW hyteria? Would Europeans have simply taken it in stride with little fanfare?

RE: #12 – I just wanted to highlight something posted by Paul M above which is of interest for UK folk, Continental folk who are Chunnelable distance away from London as well as others elsewhere who may find themselves on travel to London later this year:

“I sit on a committee in the London Insurance Market that organises lunctime lectures on insurance related issues. To counter a session we had early in 2006 that was full on “we are all doomed’, we will be hosting a lecture, provisionally titled GW – Myths and Reality, some time later this year or early next. As we have no funds to pay for speakers fees or travel, I have tried to find a UK based scientist/meteorologist/climatologist to speak but have struggled. Fortunately, Viscount Monckton has volunteered but if anyone out there has a better suggestion, I would be pleased to hear it. You can contact me direct on pmaynard@pmaynard.plus.com or maynardpg@willis.com. Other London based CA readers are welcome to contact me anyway.”

It’s not good to know that so many people have been misinformed by skeptical sources, and believe a lot of totally erroneous things. Example: “Could you explain why from 1940-1970 global temperatures decreased while CO2 increased. If an increase in green house gases caused by humans is responsible for global warming, then how do you explain this.”

There are some real howlers in there. (Like the guy that said the Finger Lakes are in Minnesota, my current favorite).

RE: #120 – Hey troll, you are conflating sloppiness of individual netizens with the efficacy of so called “skeptical sources.” That some bozo with the keyboard does not know geography does not tar, as you apparently intend to do, so called “skeptical sources” with discrediting muck.

I think that the efficacy of the skeptical sources and the audiences that they target is well-illustrated by the responses to Dr. Cullen’s blog entries. This blog maintains a fairly high science level, and I don’t consider it a skeptical source in the same vein as other, more targeted, sources.

The issue of climate change deserves clarity. Unfortunately, the concerted efforts of skeptical elements, and the mistaken beliefs that they have promoted in the general populace, have clouded the issue greatly.

Which assertion in your quoted passage do you believe to be erroneous? That “from 1940-1970 global temperatures decreased” or “from 1940-1970 … CO2 increased”. I have seen both assertions repeatedly from “non-skeptical” sources, as parts of presentations designed to convince people of the truth and seriousness of anthropogenic global warming. I am unaware of of any serious dispute over either assertion.

The error is the implicit belief resident in the poster of that comment that steadily increasing CO2 must cause a steady increase in global temperature, which is erroneous. The fostering of the belief that it should be is a skeptical creation.

“the concerted efforts of skeptical elements, and the mistaken beliefs that they have promoted in the general populace, have clouded the issue greatly.
”

Let me guess that you are not a resident of the UK? Otherwise you wouldn’t make the staement that you have above. Let me tell you that in the UK there is a great deal of concerted effort but most defintely not on the part of the ‘skeptical elements’ as you have used to refer to people like myself. In the UK ALL the concerte deffort is on the part of the eco-theologically motivated believers. I wa slistening to BBC Radio 4 the other morning and had to put up with Jonathan Porritt’s b******t claim that the IPCC FAR will show that the consensus is now even stronger that global warming is predominant caused by man and that we must act now, without delay.

Now let me correct your misconception. Amongst the relatively small proportion of the UK populace that I have had a chance to survey, the general feeling amongst is that GW and how is is presented within the media is ‘just another hyped issue that will be used as an excus eto tax us even more. I’m glad to report that they are skeptical NOT because of blogs like Climateaudit or the the Royyal Society’s claim influenc eof Exxon-Mobil’s funding of the CEI, but rather by the fact that they just don’t belive anything that this government says any longer. They are fed up with paying more an more taxes which they now see (why couldn’t they see this before the last election?) are being wasting on yet more bureaucracy that continues to impose constraints on what they can and cannot do. They want to know why we are continuing to send our young men to Afghanistan and Iraq? They really don’t give a f*t f**k about global warming. Somehow they’ve worked it out for themselves that the mainstream media and the BBC inparticular have their own agenda. When I start to tell them about the ‘science’ that underpins the AGW debate they are not in the least surprised that claims the the establishment claims (e.g. Stren Report) are ‘alarmist’ and biaased. Post the ‘dodgy dossier’ 45 minute WMD claim who can blame them.

Great news! The scientific consensus on global warming has been extended to all of creationist evangelical U.S. churches, after 2-month-long negotiations between evangelicals and scientists at Harvard University. In other words, about 30 million creationists have now joined the fight against the global warming. Evolutionists and creationists joined the forces.

The only detail that the evolutionists had to sacrifice was evolution. Everyone agreed that life on Earth should now be referred to as The Creation because some differences in the opinion about creation are far less important than something that all good people of the world agree on – that the world is approaching a judgement day.

Wouldn’t you think that as recently as 2 years ago, this information would still be viewed as a cool joke? Now it’s reality.

Evidence of the Ancien Regime in the U.S. House of Representatives is being demolished. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has a new website. As far as I can tell, the Wegman Report has been expunged from the archive. I’ve posted it up here and changed the link.

Dear Steve #130, exactly – there is a very funny issue about the relevant timescales. In reality, there exist all possible timescales from 10^{-43} seconds to 13.7 billion years. Various things occur at various timescales. What is the time interval at which the global warming is the ultimate truth? Well, it is surely shorter than a million of years because of these glaciers over Manhattan etc. At geological timescales, more weird things have occurred, unless one really gets a common voice with Young Earth creationists.

Some data and your work may indicate that the scale of detectable warming in the past could be shorter than 500 years. In 500 years or less in the future, we may also run out of fossil fuels so the effect could also stop in the future. On the other hand, the relevant timescale must be longer than 8 years because there can exist periods of 8 years or even 30 years during the modern era when the warming is not detectable or there is even cooling. The global warming catastrophe must be kind of squeezed to this interval of timescales and it is all just far too shaky.

Heidi Cullen under the skeptical heat

A different comment that many people here could have missed: Heidi Cullen from the Weather Channel has bravely proposed to decertify all weathermen in the U.S. who have been seen to express skeptical opinions about the climate change. Among 1190 reactions to her newer, more moderate comments, about 95% are skeptics who don’t like what she thinks about the character of the debate:

They apparently stopped new comments. It is refreshing to see the power of the skeptical U.S. core although not all reactions are exactly well-informed either. 😉 Given the fact that they will now tell her that the channel has lost a fraction of the audience, my respect for her courage is high, despite her Stalinist methods to decide weather questions. 🙂

Well, well. Some “climate expert” on “The Weather Channel” wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for “tolerance”, huh?

I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. Here are the basic facts you need to know:

*Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab.

*The climate of this planet has been changing since God put the planet here. It will always change, and the warming in the last 10 years is not much difference than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe.

If you don’t like to listen to me, find another meteorologist with no tie to grant money for research on the subject. I would not listen to anyone that is a politician, a journalist, or someone in science who is generating revenue from this issue.

In fact, I encourage you to listen to WeatherBrains episode number 12, featuring Alabama State Climatologist John Christy, and WeatherBrains episode number 17, featuring Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University, one of the most brilliant minds in our science.

WeatherBrains, by the way, is our weekly 30 minute netcast.

I have nothing against “The Weather Channel”, but they have crossed the line into a political and cultural region where I simply won’t go.”

Okay, I don’t totally agree with everything this guy is saying. Now, if he meant to talk about the potential for billions of dollars of redistributed wealth through carbon caps and trading, then I would probably agree. See this latest attempt…Industry wants Bush to cap emissions.

In a statement, the 10 U.S.-based companies and four environmental groups called for mandatory reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, including those from power plants, transportation and buildings.

Called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the group includes aluminum giant Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, DuPont, General Electric, Lehman Brothers and four utilities with a big stake in climate policy: Duke Energy, FPL Group, PG&E and PNM Resources. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and GE’s NBC Universal unit.)

The environmental partners are Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the World Resources Institute.

‘Cap-and-trade’ approach
The partnership said the cornerstone of its approach to fighting global warming would be “a cap-and-trade program,” echoing what Democrats and many environmentalists have proposed: a system that allows companies to buy and sell carbon credits. In such a system, emissions would be capped. Companies that reduce emissions and don’t hit their limits could sell what is left over to companies that exceed their limits.

The coalition’s diversity could send a signal that businesses want to get ahead of the increasing political momentum for federal emissions controls, in part to protect their long-term interests, the Times said.

There’s no diversity here. It’s all about profit for these and similar groups.

#135 Fair enough, I apologize Steve. As a long-time lurker, I’m continually amazed and humbled by the level of the scientific discussion at this site. When the discourse started to veer into an area where I (finally!) have some level expertise, I wanted to chime in. But you are correct, let’s stick to climate.

#108, #137 Julian. I think you might be confusing two different things here – we need to distinguish between dating, based on the decay of radioactive carbon 14 and isotopic fractionation between carbon 13 and carbon 12 (fractionation being the subtle alteration of the ratio of these two isotopes) used for inferring temperatures and sources of material.

There are two stable isotopes of carbon (with masses 12 and 13) and a radioactive isotope, carbon 14. Carbon 14 is created by cosmic rays impacting nitrogen nuclei in the upper atmosphere. C14 is radioactive and has a half life of 5730 years. In things that are exchanging gases with the atmosphere, the ratio of C14 to C12 and C13 is constant (give or take some subtleties to be discussed below). That applies to living things, fresh ice – you name it. As the C14 decays, it is replaced by fresh C14 from the atmosphere so for things in equilibrium with the atmosphere, the ratio of C14/C12 is constant (at about 1e-12) (Sorry, my mastery of formatting in posting here is very limited, for every 10^12 (ten to the power 12) atoms of C12 there is one atom of C14).

When the living thing dies and becomes buried – ie isolated from fresh atmospheric exchange then the C14 is no longer replenished and the C14/C12 ratio drops at a known rate, enabling the dating of when it was last in equilibrium with the atmosphere. The same would be true of ice as it is buried and overlaid by fresh ice above it. Note, for this to work, the material must truly be isolated from freshly produced, modern, C14. This may not be a very good assumption but there are ways and tests for checking.

By contrast all carbon on Earth has, to a good approximation, one C13 atom for every 89 C12 atoms. This ratio does not change markedly (unless you do things with nuclear reactors etc). The ratio is not exactly constant however since because the two isotopes have different masses, molecules that contain these two isotopes, eg CO2 have slightly different masses, 48 and 49 in the case of CO2 and so they have slightly different reaction rates when undergoing chemical reactions or slightly different evaporation rates. Generally the molecule containing the lighter isotopes will react faster, evaporate more easily etc. The effects are subtle, that ratio C13/C12=1/89 only changes by parts in a thousand, but that can be reliably measured. C12 and C13 are not destroyed so if an evaporating vapour contains more of the lighter isotope, the remaining liquid must contain more of the heavier. Hence the different isotopes are said to fractionate between two reservoirs (reservoirs here being liquid and vapour). The degree of fractionation is temperature dependent so IF you know the isotopic composition of your source materials, then you can work out the temperature at which the process happened. I capitalize IF there because it is a big ‘if’, you need some independent means of working this out.

In principle you could use C14 to determine this isotopic fractionation since the mass difference to C12 is twice that between C13 and C12 but in practice, C14 is so rare you don’t have enough atoms to give the required precision.

Where tree rings come in again – how can we infer what the cosmic ray flux was in the past? (if you are interested in these questions such as does cosmic ray variability cause variation in cloud cover which affects global temperature). Well, I said above that C14/C12 ratio is constant in the atmosphere but of course it is only constant if the rate of creation of C14 from N14 is constant. So if we take tree rings and count back, then we have an exact chronometer back over thousands of years. If we measure the C14/C12 ratio (=age) against the exact age of a tree ring deduced by counting then it should exactly match. But it does not. It closely agrees (otherwise the method would be useless) but there are variations and this is put down to variations in the flux of cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere, hence the cosmic ray flux through the past can be deduced. Similarly by counting ice layers in an ice core, if they are annual, we can look for consistency.

My post worked and I have a volunteer. Strictly, the event is only open to members of the Insurance Institute of London and people that work in the Lonson Insurance Market but if any one else would like to support, they are welcome to contact me. It is held in the Lloyd’s building in Lime Street, the time will be 1:15 for 45 mins and it will happen sometime between October 2007 and April 2008. Our sace is limited to about 200.

Re 125

Kevin is right. Virtually all UK media have given up any attempt at debate on AGW or for that matter anything remotely scientific. Just now, we have the BBC with a headlne on the latest US junk science claim about a link between Transfats and Fertility in women. The source s Harvard and we know from past experience that when we get at the numbers there will be no demonstrable ‘link’ at all. But can we expect the BBC to challenge -no they just swallow the press release hook line and sinker. By the way, next week (I think)there is a BBC TV programme on CC and planet earth. I offer a prize of lunch if you can guess what the conclusion will be.

Back to AGW. In Thursday’s Spectator, there is an interview with Stern. Apart from the usual ad hominem reference to ‘deniers’, it does appear to suggest that he suggests that all his conclusions are based upon mathmatical models and these may not be absolutley correct! But does the journo understand the implication? You guess the result again.

By the way, next week (I think)there is a BBC TV programme on CC and planet earth.

It’s tomorrow (Sunday), BBC1, 8 pm – Global Warming: Britain Under Threat
From the blurb in the Radio Times : This sober, scientific programme looks at the scale of climate change that Britain faces in coming decades and what it might do to our way of life and countryside. The wise presence of David Attenborough, shaking his grey locks mournfully as he delivers dire warnings, is enough to make anyone take it seriously.

(What I’d like to know: why natural forcings results are higher in 1850 than 2000 in (a)? Is it a surprise that the error variance is decreased by the addition of a further variate? What does sufficient to explain the observed changes actually mean?)

I always thought the “1935-1975″Ⱡperiod had been adequately covered by Fig. 4 of the TAR SPM (http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/007.htm) – I also recall that this has also been discussed to death on climateaudit, so let’s not go there

Were those Finger Lakes in MN formed by glacial action or the meanders of the Mississippi River? The poster asserted that the Finger Lakes of Minnesota were formed by glacial action (of course, most of the lakes in MN are related to continental glaciation).

Thanks for that. I’m aware, in a qualitative sort of way, what happens to isotopes during biological fractionisation and I’m trying to follow a line of reasoning.

The ‘smoking gun’ that indicates the burning of depleted-of-heavier-isotope carbon compounds is a pointer to the A in AGW. I am trying to work out what the signal would be if we looked at previous warming events and found that the same smoking gun is operating in the past. One can’t just use the 14C decay, because the signal will start out reduced if the same (non-A!) process happened before. A bubble dated by carbon decay would, I assume, look older than it is if it started out already depleted.

Do the bubbles indicate anything odd going on with isotope ratios, or is the signal too small?

A different comment that many people here could have missed: Heidi Cullen from the Weather Channel has bravely proposed to decertify all weathermen in the U.S. who have been seen to express skeptical opinions about the climate change. Among 1190 reactions to her newer, more moderate comments, about 95% are skeptics who don’t like what she thinks about the character of the debate:

They apparently stopped new comments. It is refreshing to see the power of the skeptical U.S. core although not all reactions are exactly well-informed either. Given the fact that they will now tell her that the channel has lost a fraction of the audience, my respect for her courage is high, despite her Stalinist methods to decide weather questions.

Wow, nearly 1,200 comments in less than 48 hours (the vast, vast majority skeptics with a pretty good knowledge about the science behind this scam.)

Everyone should have a quick look at this. It almost restores my faith that people are not lemmings after all.

the vast, vast majority skeptics with a pretty good knowledge about the science behind this scam.

It looked to me like the vast majority just wanted to call Dr. Cullen [snip] i and state that they weren’t watching The Weather Channel anymore. It did provide a nice review of all of the skeptical arguments that have been made over the past two decades or so.

It’s not quite skeptics only: at 7 percent, there is a comment by a famous mainstream scholar 🙂

I am personally submitting legislation to prevent weathermen and women from stating that Global Warming is not happening and that man-made impact is the primary cause of Global Warming. Hiedi, you go girl! We all know that George and Neal and Rush are the ones who are trying to take away a woman ability to make her opinion known. When Al is named President, like he should have been 6 years ago, he’ll help make everything better and I’ll be there to help him. Weather Channel, you’re the best!

Dear Steve, we often ask the same questions. My beliefs about her identity are exactly 50:50. On one hand, there is nothing impossible about such a support from a leading politician – Pelosi just established the new AGW committee. It is also very natural that she would also include feminist flavor to such support. If it were faked, the writer had to be pretty intelligent. On the other hand, the kisses and hugs could be too unofficial and naming Al Gore president could be overly unrealistic. 😉

Concerning Dr in the name, I also find it somewhat pretentious although this could be because of the non-Academic nature of my background e.g. father. But it is certainly true that it has been used by many people to artificially increase their scholarly image. Dr Chris Oakley is the kind of people I have in mind.

While I have no definitive answer on the finger lakes in MN, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were formed by glaciation. 16,000 years ago, glaciers moved as far south as southern Ohio and even further south in other areas. There are a number of moraine deposits left be retreating glaciers. See these links..

I particularly like the last one. It has a pretty good discussion on the changing climate of Ohio based on the radio-carbon dating and pollen stratugraphy in the document.

#150

Steve, this is pure speculation on my part, but since Google’s acquisition of YouTube, there have been a number of videos disappearing from the site. Take it for what it’s worth, but Google is a big supporter of the Democrats and since the Democrats are big supporters of the AGW position, it’s possible it was removed for that reason. I have no proof of this, just my opinion.

#138
“Similarly by counting ice layers in an ice core, if they are annual, we can look for consistency.” True, and your qualifier of “if they are annual” is very important. Tree rings are clearly defind to the point of being able to distinguish growth within a season. However, even here there are years when there is no growth. This can be detectd by comparison with other rings or ring assemblies, but its occurrence must be acknowledged. Ice cores do initially form in layers, but here the possibility of layers being eliminated by wind removing the snow or drifting snow abrading an older layer or layers is a distinct possibility and problem. Each layer of snow is presumed to be annual, but you can also have snow blown into an area which is not a reflection of the annual fall. Of course, air trapped in the layer may ultimately reflect the year in which that occurred.
As the layers form they are compressed and a process of transformation through granulation to solid ice occurs. At some point the combination of melding and flow will cause the layers to become blurred and eventually indistinguishable. (It is at this point the ‘dating’ becomes problematic.) Similarly the air bubbles are gradually eliminated. They are also infiltrated by melt water (contaminated) as Jaworoski explains. I understand that at 2000 m an 8 m section of ice is required to produce a single sample and at that depth this represents 10,000 years. Can anyone confirm this last point?

I could go on with the whole altering James Hansen’s graphs before testifying to congress and suing people who point out inaccuraciues in biographies and so much more, but you get the point, dontcha george?

Re 151: Comedy Central has asked (!) that their clips be removed from Youtube according to C|NET. There is a John Hodgman piece on Global Warming served directly by Comedy Central.Daily Show: Hodgman – Global WarmingThe consensus among most scientists is that it’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes.

That is obviously someone’s exaggerated take on what they think might be a Pelosi reply. Politicians are much too savvy to use those clichés as they have mastered the use of much less obvious and nuanced ones.

I would hope that politicians (and prominent scientists in the public view, for that matter) of all manner and persuasions would seriously condemn someone who has suggested restricting speech by way of a certification. A quick search revealed that hiring of meteorologists is apparently not limited by a lack of American Meteorological Society certification, so I would assume that the a non-technical restriction such as suggested would weaken the influence and prestige of the certification more than anything else.

I do have some concerns about how these upcoming political discussions of GW/AGW are handled. Those concerns will become more real when or if I begin to hear phrases like the “War on GW and/or AGW” because that would seem to be setting the stage for “war time” restrictions on civil liberties or at least attempts to invoke loyalty oaths as it would appear the weather girl was suggesting.

Could it be this entire L’affair Cullen is just a cheap publicity stunt gone awry? If ratings for her climate show sink, Dr Cullen’s show and her association with the TWC will be quite short. Remember the TWC is more entertainment than anything else. The fact that she had to issue a “clairification” this week indicates that some in management are a bit worried. If negative feedback continues and garners continued exposure on blogs like Drudge, look for TWC to quietly limit thier exposure. In the media it all comes down to ratings.

From all of the negative comments to her call for decertification, there appears to be a gulf between the professorati and those who follow weather as generalists,ametuers, hobbyists and operational forecasters. Re-education is in order.

I believe ‘Dr. Curry’ would the most appropriate reference. You should probably hold back on the pop cult appellation until such time as Dr. Curry becomes a regular on the Hurricane Channel. I believe at that time your question will be appropos.

The “squashing of skeptics” thing re AGW is a very unfortunate situation. The problem as I see it is that AGW has been attacked by ideologues who know the answer (and AGW isn’t it), because they don’t like the economic implications of Kyoto. Competitive Enterprise Institute is a prime example in the ideologue category. There is simply no point in arguing with them, they use strategies of the lawyer rather than the scientist in arguing about a scientific subject. Some people refer to this group as “contrarians” or “deniers”, neither name is very apt in my opinion, I prefer ideologue. There are of course ideologues on both sides of the issue.

On to subject of skeptics. I define a bonafide skeptic as someone who falls into one of these categories:
a) a scientist or other person with some technical training that is actually doing work to investigate the subject (e.g. analyzing data, etc)
b) a scientist with substantial training in the relevant field (e.g. graduate degree) that has carefully evaluated the literature on the subject, assessed it, and formed an opinion.

I would argue that the climateaudit principals (steveM, Willis, Jean S, etc) are bonafide skeptics of type a. I was dismayed to see them categorized as “deniers” over on a new blog that has some potential to be interestinghttp://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/01/12/red-white-blue-noise-that-is/ (in spite of my attempt to defend Willis and Jean who posted over there)

Many of the weather forecasters that are “skeptical” don’t fall in either category a or b. While the certified AMS broadcast meteorologists do have some technical credentials (some have graduate degrees), most simply haven’t done their homework sufficiently to qualify as a category b skeptic, and this point was made in Heidi Cullen’s post (it is implicit in the last statement of the weather forecaster that she quotes)

In my opinion, this is a really big problem. Earlier this week I received a personal email from an operational weather forecaster on the tropical listserve, here is an excerpt

“This issue of global warming has been quite compelling to me, and I have
done a sufficient amount of web surfing and reading to conclude that we
humans are pumping way too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere. We are either causing global warming or at least
significantly contributing to it.

The above statement comes from a person who was an avowed AGW ‘skeptic’
— I really did not believe it. Climate signals are too complex and all
that…..

Well, so I am a reluctant convert. I don’t ‘believe’ in AGW, I accept
it as fact. I have always respected Dr. Gray of CSU and still do, but I
don’t agree with him (at least, not entirely). AGW is not a fraud. It
is real. It is a huge problem. I am convinced.

Now, having said this, I’d like to say that the community at large in
the email group is one that I know somewhat well…not all have the
climate background that you possess. Like me, they have not studied
this issue (I might be bold enough to say that I have probably studied
it more than many). Many meteorologists have a day-to-day outlook, not a
decade-to-decade view. BUT, with all the activity going on about the
AGW issue, folks and friends out in the town inevitably ask “so what’s
up with this global warming thing?”. The reaction is probably that
‘…well, it needs more study…’ since they might not really know
enough to speak authoritatively. ”

The point is not so much that he came down on the side of being convinced by the AGW arguments, but that he made the effort to investigate the issue. People having access to the public through the media (particularly when their salary is paid by said media, as opposed to freelancers in the blogosphere) arguably have the obligation to do their homework on this subject. Heidi Cullen was essentially suggesting that those too lazy to their homework should default to the AMS “party line”

Further excerpts from the email that I received:

” Now clearly, meteorology has subspecialties. I am focused on
Meteorological Satellites. Others on Radar. Some on Svr Weather. Some
on Hurricanes, and finally some on Climate (among numerous other
specialties). Being good at one does not necessarily make you good in
the other. Consider my analogy again… certainly an OB/GYN should know
*something* about pediatrics (and vice versa), but how much?

I think that when you read these seemingly negative, anti-AGW emails, I
think that people are saying – in some sense – that (1) is this an
operational issue? Will someone die/be hurt today because of this? Then
who cares? (2) this does not affect me in my job right now, (3) you’re
figuratively taking about pediatrics to an OB/GYN. You don’t speak my
language.”

This summarizes to me what the issue is in the so called skepticism of many of the operational meteorologists. The “you don’t speak my language” is also apt description of the divide between some climate researchers and statisticians.

#161. Judith, it’s nice being a grandparent, isn’t it? I’m lucky enough that our grandchildren live nearby in Toronto. I remember reading somewhere that Dick Cheney’s grandchildren regularly stayed over them, which made him seem much more human.

AS to “using strategies of the lawyer”, that’s mostly been my impression of the realclimate crowd in any of the matters that I’ve been involved with. Like William Connolley and countless others using McKitrick’s degree-radian programming error in an unrelated article to impugn our critique of MBH.
Except they are not very good lawyers. Did you read Mann’s letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee about how his source code was his personal property? Or to a Wall Street Journal reporter who started out sympathetic to him that he would not be “intimidated” into disclosing algorithm? Any litigation lawyer would have told him not to fight this issue. I wrote an interesting post at the time, which amused me, that Mann’s letter to the commitee was probably the first occasion in which the tort of conversion was committed in answering a congressional letter (IT was an esoteric post, but amusing.)
The worse problem is that people like you did not stand up at the time and say: Mike, you’re being a jerk and making us all look bad.

Or what about Phil Jones – “we’ve got 25 years invested in this – why should I let you see my data when your only objective is to find something wrong with it?” When Hans von Storch asked him to confirm this, he stood by it. Why don’t you write Jones and tell him off.
Despite the fact that I have a very bad impression of the personalities in the field, I do not exclude the possibility that there is some valid point underneath it all. But before you blame CEI or Exxon for perception problems, you folks should clean up your own act. Tell the bad actors to behave themselves. A good lawyer would tell you to stop fighting stupid issues like data. I realize that you personally are trying to avoid such matters, but you’ve not taken any leadership in getting the Hockey Team to behave properly.

Steve, I agree that that Phil Jones’ position on the data is indefensible, and that Mike Mann hasn’t always appropriately drawn the line between ideologues and bonafide skeptics. Over on the Open Mind blog, being a frequent poster at climateaudit apparently is sufficient to brand someone as a “denier” and worth dismissing. There are a few signs that I am getting “tarnished” by this as well; on a recent RC thread on the decline of the arctic sea ice projected by climate models, i posted about uncertainties in the sea ice models, and I was attacked by someone as being a denier. I was tempted to write back to remind them that I am one of the so called “alarmists” that brought them the hurricane-AGW issue.

Note, we are no longer arguing with the likes of Myron Ebell (Competitive Enerprise Institute lawyer; in the early days of the AGW-hurricane stuff, Peter Webster was on the Lou Dobbs show arguing with lawyer Myron Ebell over the “science”). And we shouldn’t be wasting our time in this way.

However, it is all too easy to label someone as a “denier” and dismiss them, Willis E should not be lumped with Myron Ebell (as was essentially done over at Open Mind). In my integrity of science presentation at AGU I made this argument, that we need to draw this line very carefully, and be very serious in our responses to bonafide skeptics, make our data and methods publicly available, etc.http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/AGU_IntegrityofScience_Curry.pdf

I am married to a grandmother, but I cut her no slack either, nor she me. I read your post and I come away saying that all those generalizations mean little in the context of attempting to get to the bottom of specific issues that we are discussing at CA. I think those of us reading at this blog, with any awareness at all, know full well from where you stand and are coming with these comments, but that is not what will enlighten or inform us about the specific issues.

As to Boris’ question concerning my reference to the “weather girl” and what that portends for addressing Dr. Curry, I would advise him to view my references within context. My grandson and I refer to the females on the Weather Channel as weather girls and the males as weather guys. We have favorite weather girls and guys. I assumed that Heidi with whom we are not familiar was a Weather Channel girl as she must perform there. When I address Judith Curry here it might be as Dr. Curry, or Judith or Judy, as I judge the situations warrants, and with no disrespect intended. I could invoke certain privileges of age as Dr. Curry is, I am certain a young grandparent, and I am an older grandparent.

I just want to say how refreshing it is that Dr Judith Curry engages here, in a rational and fair way, and is clearly doing her very best to ensure that sound science drives the debate. A big thank you to Dr Curry.

I could be a grandmother soon, my oldest daughter is old enough to think about those things. “Babe” “girl”, anything like that you can call me or my friends even when you disagree with us is fine with us. Are you kidding? Some of us do not want to live in a world where men (and women) are afraid to speak for fear of offending somebody all the time either. Names mean nothing. Speaking of humans-we all should know this already! Names will never hurt me.

Only the data and truth matters here, no matter what we call each other, and politics should have nothing to do with how the DATA is shared or presented, and should not matter to the conclusions from that data!

Whether the data is written down in pencil, archived or “published”, on paper, on a computer, on a blog, on a scientist’s note pad or on an oil tycoon’s left boot strap-this does not matter either. It does not matter to the Theory of Relativity, it does not matter here. There is no way we’ve got this climate all figured out. But labeling, or guilt trips, creating a wedge between people, creating fear for my children about their future or blaming ANY body-does not measure up at all on my truth-o-meter-yard-stick.

the decline of the arctic sea ice projected by climate models, i posted about uncertainties in the sea ice models

the sea-ice module in the Echo-G model leads to completely wrong results in those gridcells. I noticed this when I looked through their model output last year. (I didn’t do a post on it.) IF they’ve got this wrong, then I presume that this would be likely to be a flaw in other models.

The problem as I see it is that AGW has been attacked by ideologues who know the answer (and AGW isn’t it), because they don’t like the economic implications of Kyoto. Competitive Enterprise Institute is a prime example in the ideologue category.

Note: Here we are not presented the actual counter argument to anything any skeptic says. We are told their arguments should be dismissed because the people who advance them are a) ideologues and b) they are disposed to take the position they take.

In Judy’s #161 further complains that some arguing against AGW use tactics of lawyers and not scientists.

I would like to point out ad hominem arguments are logical fallacies generally derided by both lawyers and scientists. It might be wise for those who deride these tactics, publicly — say in their August BAMS 2006 article — and then advise others to read said article — should avoid resorting to using these tactics.

re 163:
Judith, have you read some of Willis’ other arguments here? He has recently stated that hansen’s “scenario B”O overstates warming compared to actual warming – Steve M gave him a thread for that. He got this result by resetting the baseline so that “Scenario B” was above observed temps, and then pointed to the fact that in his redrawn graph, scenario B is above observed. When pushed on this, he further argued that the slope of Hansen’s scenario B is 33% greater than observed temps – he got that result by reporting to one sig fig, and by pretending that his trend line fit to Scenario B had no confidence interval because the output of the models is deterministic. This despite having it pointed out to him that simply changing the period over which the trend was fit, returned different slopes.

161, Judith. Oh, boy, now we are trying to define “skeptic.” LOL. Please let me add category (c): those who have a modicum of intelligence and have studied Steve M’s treatises on the Hockey Stick studies (and some other “reconstructions…”). Anyone who has read the history of these “sagas” and understands them should be a deemed a skeptic with full priviliges thereof. LOL.

Willis’ contribution to Open Mind, and the response, was one of he funniest things I’ve seen recently on the internet. Termio (or whatever) should change the name to “Closed Mind” not that will save what looks like the dullest blog proposed.

But check this out:

“Certain scientific disciplines tend to be not so good at statistical analysis! But over the last couple of years, I’ve investigated closely much of the statistical analyses in climate science. I’ve found that climate scientists in general do an outstanding job of statistical analysis, and often collaborate with statisticians to apply cutting-edge techniques. From this mathematician’s point of view, the application of statistical analysis in climate science is 1st-rate.”

The Wall Street Journal commentary Will Al Gore Melt? — If not, why did he chicken out on an interview? which was originally behind the paywall is now on line for free. It was written by Flemming Rose (Jyllands-Posten) and Bjorn Lomborg (Copenhagen Business School).

James, I found it both funny and tragic. I was banned from Open Mind, but not because of errors of fact. I was banned because Tamino got cold feet about answering my questions. He disagreed with some of my statements, it is true, but after I had made almost all of the statements he later found so repugnant, he said:

I hope you’ll stick around “¢’¬? every global warming advocacy site (I think this qualifies) needs a good skeptic! And your level of civility in discussion is admirable (which is one of the things I most want for my blog “¢’¬? thank you

After that, I said that since downwelling “greenhouse” IR is ~ 325 W/m2, and the earth is warmer because of this by about 33°, that the climate sensitivity must be about 33/325, or about 0.1°C. He replied, saying:

You have confirmed my suspicion. Honestly, no offense meant “¢’¬? but you’re not too savvy about the rest of the science.

“It is generally accepted that without the greenhouse effect, the world would be about 33°C cooler. It is also generally accepted that the total downwelling “greenhouse” radiation is about 325 W/m2.”

No, it’s generally accepted that that’s the total downwelling longwave (LW) radiation. The atmosphere, whether it has greenhouse gases (GHG) or not, is warm, and hence will emit longwave radiation.

…

The question is, what’s the difference between having greenhouse gases and not having them? The difference “¢’¬? the part due to GHG “¢’¬? is around 122 W/m^2.

I wrote back and said:

Thanks for your reply. You say:

Willis

“You have confirmed my suspicion. Honestly, no offense meant “¢’¬? but you’re not too savvy about the rest of the science.”

Ooooh, dueling insults … can I play?

Tamino, you have confirmed my worst fears. Truly, no offense meant “¢’¬? but you have the social skills of a six year old. Adults know that “no offense meant” does nothing but cloak an insult in a veneer of responsibility.

Whether either of us is “savvy about the rest of the science” is not determined yet, and will not be determined by insults, or by unsupported claims regarding the other’s skills and abilities. I’d much prefer to keep this civil, and I have only insulted you in this fashion to show you the effect of your words and condescending tone. Can we get back to the science?

Not wanting to get sidetracked into how Kirchhoff’s law means that while the non-greenhouse gases (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) do emit as he claimed, they emit only as well as they absorb, and they don’t absorb IR in any significant way, I simply asked:

OK, let me make a change to my statement so that we can agree. Let me say:

It is also generally accepted that the total downwelling radiation is about 325 W/m2.

Heck, I didn’t care what he called downwelling IR, I just wanted to discuss it. So I asked the fateful question:

Now, a question for you, so we can see where our differences are. Let’s take it one question at a time, so we can build upon agreement.

1) If the atmosphere were composed solely of oxygen and nitrogen, and the earth received 235 W/m2 from the sun, what would be the temperature of the earth?

Tamino lost it at that point, and banned me from the site, claiming that I had made too many errors in my analysis … including this one:

[I had said] “It is also generally accepted that the total downwelling “greenhouse” radiation is about 325 W/m2.”

Utterly false, but you got called on this and have now changed your tune.

Changed my tune? Changed my tune about what? I don’t care if you call it greenhouse radiation or DLR or infrared radiation.

Here was a further exchange with Judith Curry, after I had been banned:

JUDITH CURRYI just spotted this site, this particular thread is very useful. Tamino, I would like to add that based upon my own “sparring” over at climateaudit, Willis and Jean S are among the best of the skeptics, and have unfailingly tried to be polite and dig into the science in a meaningful way.

[TAMINOResponse: Thanks for stopping in. And thanks for your aforementioned paper, which is very useful and a good read to boot.

Permit me to doubt about Willis. Example: he actually stated that CO2 started rising around 1930. This means that he has never bothered to look at the data, but he’s still willing to make “factual” claims about it. That’s hardly what I call “digging into the science in a meaningful way.” And it’s increasingly clear that he will beat a dead horse until the end of time.

If he wants to do that at climateaudit, that’s their business and his. But this is my house. I’m not letting my blog turn into a “debate” site. There are plenty of those; anybody who craves a debate can find many “¢’¬? elsewhere.]

Which I found quite true, he’s happy to pontificate, but unwilling to debate the science. And Judith, thank you kindly for the vote of confidence, but it didn’t dent his armor. Truly, his statement is correct — his site has nothing to do with scientific debate.

His main beef against me seems to be this:

Permit me to doubt about Willis. Example: he actually stated that CO2 started rising around 1930. This means that he has never bothered to look at the data, but he’s still willing to make “factual” claims about it.

Oh, yeah, right, I’ve never looked at the CO2 data … in context, what I meant was that the modern large rise in CO2 had started in the early part of the century, sometime around the 1930s. In the same paragraph, I said “Perhaps you could comment on why the temperature rose without much CO2, and why they dropped when CO2 emissions were many times larger?”, clearly showing that I was aware that CO2 rose pre-1930, just not as much.

He said that “When you say, “This is around the time when CO2 started rising,” you are mistaken. CO2 started rising in the 1800s, and crossed the 300 ppmv level right around 1910 …”. Seeing that my writing had not been clear, I replied, saying

From the start of the Forestburg temperature record in the main post above (1891) to 1930, CO2 forcing rose by about a quarter of a Watt/square meter (W/m2). From 1930 to the end of the record, CO2 forcing rose by five times! that much, about one and a quarter W/m2.

… I figured that would clarify the fact that I knew how not only what the rise was, but how much forcing change that implied. Since then, he has steadfastly ignored that, and continues to claim that I think CO2 started rising in the year 1930, and didn’t rise before that … riiiight.

Ah, well, I’ve learned my lesson … never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and the pig gets annoyed … it’s too bad, actually, the site had promise, but the iron hand of censorship has descended. He now says the site is not for debate, it’s for “those who have heard denialist arguments and genuinely want more information” …

Of course, once I was banned from the site, Dano and Steve Bloom immediately jumped up to proudly tell the teacher how they knew all along that I was a bad boy … gentlemen, I call that pretty low, insulting a man in a forum where he is not given a voice to defend himself from your calumnious fabrications.

And Lee, we’ve been over the science of the Hansen claims many times. If you think Hansen’s trends have a confidence interval, you’ll have to take it up with Hansen, he doesn’t think so. If you can’t understand the science, at least stop abusing the people who have been kind enough to try to explain it to you. Your characterization of the discussion is replete with errors and full of spite. Many people tried to explain it to you, and you have repaid them with unkindness.

#171 We can also add another catagory (d) for those like my father who are skeptical already for the many reasons most of us have (Like RealClimate scientists pushing to get Al Gore’s movie into the public school system) and who said : “Sheesh, they can’t even get the hurricane forcasts right”. LOL So last year, just because of the hurricane data, an even bigger crop of people already skeptical of the hype, and not into the science of it so much, could have been pushed over the edge to full blown skeptic just because of hurricanes or lack there of in the news last year.

re: Open Mind. I went to that blog as Willis misposted his arguments here. Read a few posts, and found the piece quoted by James in #172 just amazing, and commented it (my only comment over there). The guy claims to be a mathematician specializing in time series, yet, his second post is in defense of Hockey Stick, where he, among other things, calls people critisising HT “denialists”. I invite everyone to read that post to see how “open mind” the guy really has. At least, he knows nothing about the HS beyond posts over RC.

Anyhow, I now returned [thanks Judith for the nice words!] to the blog to find this comment by Steve Bloom. That’s an outrageous comment based on pure lies (it’s even demonstratably so, e.g., I NEVER discuss physics as I know my limits unlike some else). My English is not good enough to describe how offended I’m by that comment. It just shows exactly what type of a human being you are, Steve Bloom, and reassures me again that I did the right decision when I decided to post with a pseudoname instead of my real one. There really are people out there who try to harm you if an opportunity is given.

For the record, my beliefs about AGW have so far fitted to the “IPCC consensus”, although my best guess about the climate sensitivity would be in the lower end of the IPCC range. If that makes me a “denialist”, I think there are plenty of us around.

Finally, Steve Bloom, about your comment about understanding statistics and climate science in general: I guess you failed to notice that the owner of the “Open Mind” blog is a mathematician “with an amateur knowledge of the [climate] science”.

This is all I am going to comment this issue here or there. I hope Steve M. lets this through although this is not stricly about this blog.

As I recall the whole 1930 issue was whether there is anything significant about 1930, CO2 wise, to justify its use in the dubious “Temperature Record of the Week.”

I’ve explained on another thread how the “Temperature Record of the Week” is a statistical trick (and Margo, are you paying attention, this is one of the “lawyery” things that some skeptics do) meant to mislead CO2science’s layperson readership. The stations are cherypicked, the dates are cherrypicked and the results are useless–except to convince the uninformed.

Steve Bloom’s comment at another blog is very objectionable. I have treated him with meticulous courtesy here and am offended by his failure to reciprocate that courtesy. I have never asked any climate scientist for baby-steps explanations nor has this been a problem at this site. In any case to date where I’ve requested details on methodology (e.g, Mann), my requests have been valid and my concerns have been vindicated. His allegations against Jean S and Willis are equally objectionable and should be withdrawn. I particularly value their companionship here.

Bloom has hundreds of posts at climateaudit. Occasionally I have had to occasionally retrieve a post from Spam Karma, but have done so promptly upon notification. Others besides Bloom occasionally run foul of it for mysterious reasons. We can’t cope without it; and the problems are not serious enough for me to spend time figuring out what they are. I’m busy and I’m not going to argue or debate about Spam Karma. I occasionally remove some unpleasant personal exchanges that do not comply with blog rules. I am unaware of any posts of his with scientific content that have been removed or for that matter of any recent posts.

Weather footnote: The 2007 Southern Hemisphere storm season is running late. Normally (last 20 years, since satellites) the Southern hemisphere gets six January tropical cyclones. So far this January the number is zero.

With ten days to go, there is nothing cooking in the Indian Ocean and but two seedlings in the South Pacific, which are given only 50-50 chances of development.

There has never (since records began in 1945) been a SH January with zero storms.

What does this mean? Probably nothing, it’s weather, but if AGW gets blamed for a January European storm then perhaps AGW should get credit for stormless weather in the South Pacific.

But Willis’ comments with respect to the physics of CO2 IR downwelling is fundamental to the global warming issue.

This is what the theory of global warming is all about. The fact that an Open Mind global warming blog cannot discuss the issue rationally, cannot point to the proven physics model which shows exactly HOW doubling CO2 results in global warming, really says something to me.

The interactions of the atmosphere and the heat transfer(s) budgets are so complex, that there is not a simple physics model showing HOW CO2 results in the temperature changes claimed. In fact, the models used to estimate the changes are none other than the Global Climate Models themselves. In other words, James Hansen is THE authority on the physics of CO2 (while he is also the authority on recent past temperature records that noone can check.)

I’ve tried to find basic information on this. And your stuck with either a GCM (run by James Hansen based on a number of assumption that may or may not be true and noone can check) or with Idso’s view (based on empirical results and basic logic rather than models.) I think Willis and Idso are right.

A “huge problem” ? Compared to what? I have a problem with statements like these. How do you look at what makes something a huge problem? How many people have died because of this “huge problem”?
60+ people have died in the last week because of the freeze we having here out west. This graph here says: Figure 1. Annual population-adjusted heat-related mortality averaged across 28 major U.S. cities. Each bar represents a different decade, beginning in the mid-1960s and ending in the late 1980s. Heat-related mortality has been steadily declining (adapted from Davis et al., 2003). (If you have a problem with the source of this graph I am sure I could find other statistics that will say the same thing) I am sure terrorism, tsunamis, hunger, earthquakes, lack of clean water and disease will make heat related deaths also negate the GW “huge problem” catagory down a few notches as well. I believe a true scientist in ever sense of the word, would acknowlege the benefits of a warming world as much as they would report the negatives. And the negatives would be presented without fear, politics and hype attached as well.

I think creating new energy sources is important to many people, including me. The freeze in California caused the power grid to overload -just as much as a heat wave may do. Just because I feel that way, DOES NOT make the hypothosis that humans are changing the climate important or real. It does not matter anyway-only right now matters. And we need the things that happen produce CO2 right now. Get off the computer if you object to this. Every part of your computer was made with CO2 and petrol based products. Stop complaining, blaming, condemming, labeling, campaigning and show me a plan and don’t attach AGW to it-that’s political. That does not even matter to me. Change is the only constant thing about life anyway!

Steve Bloom and Judith Curry constantly travel in the same blog circles. Hmm what does that paticular correlation suggest? LOL

Re #179 – Looking at that blog – they CLAIM they are about science. However typically Steve Bloom’s tirade has nothing to do with science, just character assassination. So we have another blog that does not contribute anything in contrast with Climateaudit.

But predictable. Steve Bloom and that other blog spend way too much time, in my opinion, discussing the discussion and too little on the facts at hand. The moderator is doing a rather typical number, in my judgment, over there that is obviously bent on an attempt to show that Willis E is lacking in the knowledge necessary to discuss the climate issues at hand.

Those with a sincere interest in discussing the issues and facts, from protagonists to antagonists, will not let semantic issues get in the way of the discussion or use them as a debating point, but contrarily will go out of their way to understand what the other person(s) in the discussion is truly saying and arguing. Some of us are here to learn and to be enlightened, but I get the distinct feeling that some others have made up their minds about climate issues, and not being capable of articulating their POV on all occasions for whatever reasons, self righteously attempt to belittle or besmirch those with counter POVs instead of engaging them.

The question I have about this paper is the same one I have about Holland-Webster: what, specifically, is the physical hypothesis that explains the results and the conjecture about the future?

I’m inclined to believe that part of the recent (post-1976) warming has been natural, and the paper’s 60%-natural, 40% CO2 is plausible, but what I’m looking for is insight into what, specifically, drives that 60% (or 10% or 80% or whatever the natural number is).

I’ve explained on another thread how the “Temperature Record of the Week” is a statistical trick (and Margo, are you paying attention, this is one of the “lawyery” things that some skeptics do) meant to mislead CO2science’s layperson readership. The stations are cherypicked, the dates are cherrypicked and the results are useless–except to convince the uninformed.

Boris, I suppose one could rationalize a 1930s start date by pointing to the accelerating trend in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere from that time forward, but as a skeptic, one must look at all the data and particularly before that time period.

I would be curious to hear whether you have looked at WHCC start dates (in the early 1970s) for some of their data analysis and the prior time periods. Dr. Curry says that the start date was selected because of the greater confidence they had in the data after the start date.

Are the tactics at CO2science lawyerly? I would have thought that “lawyerly” tactics would apply to those actually used by respected lawyers. As such, I would have thought the following post might be an example “lawyerly” arguments:

Jim Lindgren at Volokh Conspiracy who note that it is odd when, in their BAMS paper, Curry et al first criticize skeptics for resorting to the logical fallacy of using an unrepresentative sample and then rely on one themselves. (Though, Lindgren admits discussing an unrepresentative sample might be ok– provided that the authors then admit the impact of discounting that data on their substantive conclusions. The impact is: neglecting the active hurricane season prior to 1970 introduced major uncertainty into their substantive conclusions about the increasing severity of hurricanes. Failure to discuss this impact, is, in my opinion, neither lawyerly, nor scientific. )

Oh. And guess what? Entirely ignoring existing data, and discounting its impact on your conclusion? That’s called “cherry picking”– which in comment 178, you Boris seems to consider a “lawyerly” tactic.

So, is Curry’s BAMS paper using lawyerly tactics? Or is the tactic only “lawyerly” when used by AGW skeptics?

I find your classification of skeptics very confusing. First of all, CEI are not primarily focused on atmospheric physics. They are focusing on social science. They deal with a lot of issues but the unifying theme in their analyses is liberty. Indeed, I agree that the last 500 and especially last 100 years shows that liberty has been crucial for the society.

Atmospheric science is secondary but they’re learning a lot. I am impressed by their work. Would you at least agree that they are no more ideologues than e.g. Al Gore? The number of ideologues on the pro-global-warming side is so much higher than on the other side than I am baffled why you choose to discuss this issue. 😉

It is also confusing what is the hypothetical difference between classifying your belief as a “belief” as opposed to other words that you have “accepted it as fact”. Accepting something as fact without comprehensive evidence is the same thing as belief, isn’t it?

Is it enough to be at Harvard physics faculty to be in your category b skeptic at least? If it is not enough, is it enough to be a renowned MIT scientist like Richard Lindzen? Do we have the right to think that AGW is a largely unsubstantiated ideologically driven pseudoscience after reading/writing dozens or hundreds of papers? Or does it violate some laws that the U.S. lawmakers recently voted for that we haven’t yet read?

“Accordingly, the contribution of CO2 concentration to global temperature variation is no more than 40.19%, or in other words, 59.81% of the weight of global temperature variation is caused by non-greenhouse effect”.

(I do wonder about presenting a calculation to the nearest hundreth of a percent, but perhaps that aids reconstruction by interested parties.)

They use a mathematical tool called Empirical Mode Decomposition to break the historical (1880+) temperature record into underlying natural oscillations. The paper they reference is here . It would be interesting to hear what any mathematically-inclined reader at CA has to say about this method.

re: 179 and 185
It is not the first time Mr Bloom has been caught sniping at the CA principals on another blog — his civility on this site, is as prosthetic as his statistics and thermodynamics.

Alas, with Tamino posts gaining early accolades from Mr Dano, Mr Bloom, and a slightly more learned Mr Rabett, the host of that site won’t have to work too hard to jump over such low praise. However, he has yet to do so…

I find your calculation of the sensitivity confusing, too – to say the least. 342 W/m^2 is the power that comes from the Sun as radiation, and it is essentially equal to the radiation emitted by Earth. If there is a misbalance here, it is less than 1W/m^2 if averaged annually.

See the Earth energy budget for some numbers about the flow of energy.

The equilibrium is calculated essentially by matching the black body power of Earth – emitted mostly in the infrared – with the power coming from the Sun. That would give somewhat lower temperatures than what we observe. That’s clearly because the atmosphere prevents some radiation emitted by the Earth from leaving our planet. Besides all these points, you seem to have misdefined the climate sensitivity. Your 33/325 calculation makes no sense to me but maybe I misunderstood something. Climate sensitivity is the expected increase of temperature from doubling CO2 (or, in a generalized form, from another forcing) but this increase is not linear. In some regimes, the growth is higher than expected linearly, in other regimes, it is sublinear etc. You can’t make these highly oversimplified calculations even if you started with the right numbers. See this for climate sensitivity issues:

One of the signal processing gurus I was working with recently (signal intelligence) often referred to my Gram-Schmidt decomposition as a “dominant mode decomposition,” which seems to link the two via eigenvalues. In transmission line, modes are the electric and magnetic fields, representing solutions to the differential equations that represent them. Perhaps there is a tie-in there. I started to read the paper you linked, but it is 96 pages, which will take a bit more than a quick read to digest.

Bloom is not civil on this site, either. He is a troll and should be treated as such. Willis gets banned, over phrasing no less, and Bloom is allowed to rant like the untrained hypocrite he is. No surprises.

re: 161, “belief” vs “fact”
1) Is the “fact” that you believe in, anthropogenic A-GHGs are the leading factor in GW since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, or some subset of such period to present?

And a more refined question, should you care to comment.
2) What percentages (ranges?) of GW are due to “natural” forcings vs “A”? And do you practice in your writings and communication, the apportioning of forcings/feedbacks according to natural vs A sources? For example, is incremental CO2 feedback released by any incremental warming (reduced ocean solubility, increased decomposition) attributed to A sources or apportioned natural vs A? Same question for incremental H2O…?

– – – – –

FWIW: my own opinion is that “A-GHGs are the leading factor” of contemporary GW is a belief! IMO this is because the hypothesis has not been proven to my Physics and Mathematics degree perspective; all the harder since my formal meteorology and climatology education came during the “coming ice age*” theory wave of the mid 70s!

* And the revisionist views of RC and others that this was not the “consensus wave” hypothesis of the mid 1970s is just that — revisionist. These views began to see erosion beginning in 1977-78, due to (you guessed it) well publicized multi-regional hot/drought weather events. Another popular surge on the AGW bandwagon occurred for similar weather reasons in 1988-9 when the ’01 Heinz Award winner made his modest, nominal, alarmist of projected model scenarios.

The “you don’t speak my language” is also apt description of the divide between some climate researchers and statisticians.

You’re correct. I’ve seen few climate scientists that actually understand statistics. Mann, of course, along with Rutherford (following the abysmal RM06 code, clearly modified from Schneider’s original), being the worst.

I would like to read any comments about the fairness and accuracy of a few paragraphs I wrote for an article on wikipedia called “Attribution of recent climate change.”

The paragraphs read:
* Bratcher and Giese, “Tropical Pacific decadal variability and global warming”[12] published in 2002, points to oceanic events (with a four year lag in temperatures) causing climate shifts – a 1972 event caused a climate shift resulting in warmer temperatures from 1976 until 2002. An event in 2002 caused Giese to predict a climate shift and cooler temperatures beginning in 2006. Giese’s prediction came true when 2006 temperatures were cooler than 2005 even though 2006 was an El Nino year. Giese concludes the results of his study “indicate that the human forced portion of global warming may be less than previously described.”
* Svensmark at Danish National Space Center published a report in 2006 of his team’s ability to demonstrate low-level clouds (which cool the Earth) are formed when cosmic rays come into the low atmosphere. [13] Previous research has demonstrated a reduction in cosmic rays between 1920 and 1980 when measurements were stopped. [14] Cosmic rays have not been considered as a climate forcing in any computer models. This indicates that mankind’s contribution to global warming may be less than the IPCC has indicated.
* IPCC computer generated climate models have been based on the belief that it was possible to know how much of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was attributable to mankind. This was done by measuring the changing ratio of isotopes 13C to 12C. However, in 2003 it became known that the natural variation in the ratio makes it impossible to attribute anything specifically to man’s burning of fossil fuels. [15]

I’m not sure what you’re on about, but since Dr. Curry posts here, you can ask her yourself.

As to Dr. Curry’s ideologue point, you said she didn’t provide any example or counter-argument to the skeptic ideologues (BTW, I can’t believe anyone would argue that their are not anti-AGW ideologues out there) I humbly submitted the CO2science example, which I’m sure you must agree is–well, I won’t even say lawerly, because that insults all attorneys. It’s deceptive, straight out of How to Lie with Statistics, first edition. You don’t even have to crack a textbook to figure it out either.

But it seems to me that choosing 1970 as a start date because of better data might be just fine, while choosing 1930 as the start date for increasing CO2 levels does not withstand the briefest scrutiny. The only thing interesting about 1930, CO2-wise, is that emissions go down during the first few years of the great depression. 1950 is when emissions start to ramp up. And guess what? When you look at the station data from 1950-2000, you get warming.

And yet there are more examples of prominent skeptics playing fast and loose with the scientific facts. Check out “Dr.” Pat Michaels testimony to congress, then come back and defend it.

It does not take Connelly long to delete my entries. The link would have taken you here. This is a piece that appears on NASA’s site titled “Ocean burps and climate changes?” and describes how oceans can be involved in climate change. It also describes how the ratio between C13 to C12 can change through natual variation.

Boris,
I’m sorry you don’t know what I’m going on about. In my previous comment, was responding to this comment, which appeared to be addressed to me:
“and Margo, are you paying attention, this is one of the “lawyerly” things that some skeptics do”

I assumed you were responding to my comment about Judy’s use of the term “lawyerly tactics” and that your example must reveal something about what you thought Judy might mean by “lawyerly” tactics. Is that not what you meant?

Now in #203, you say, “–I won’t even say lawyerly, because that insults all attorneys”.

Well, yes, I agree. CO2 science’s tactics aren’t lawyerly; this is rather natural as they are not lawyers. So, as I said before, I suspect Judy was not referring to them when complaining of lawyerly tactics.

Of course, you are correct. on this point: We can’t know who or what Judy meant to criticize unless Judy returns, describes the lawyerly tactics and tells us who used them. Should she do so, we will be able to discuss whether or not the “lawyerly” tactics she dislikes are good, bad, indifferent, real, ficticious or whatever. Until then, I guess we can all just wonder what she might possibly have meant.

As to you’re now saying (in a response addressed to me):

BTW, I can’t believe anyone would argue that their are not anti-AGW ideologues out there)

Has anyone made such a claim? No. I did certainly did not. I criticized Judy for arguing for her position by labeling and accusing skeptics of taking their positions because they have economic interest.

Since I was criticizing Judy for her ad hominem, what would you manage to “prove” by showing few ideologues exist? You’re arguing against this strawman (i.e. aclaim no one has made) is silly. (And BTW, if you want to play “whose ideologues are wackier”, I want to submit AGW proponent Whitley Strieber who not only believes in AGW, but also wrote a best seller on having been abducted by aliens. But, of course, his existence doesn’t tell us much about those who believe in AGW in general.)

Judy’s labeling skeptics as “ideologues”, accusing them of having economic motives for their positions and posting “lawyerly” arguments without revealing what the objectional arguments are or might be is not a wonderfully logical position. And, if Judy is going to conferences, make PPT presentation and write BAMS articles criticizing unnamed skeptics for logical fallacies (giving no examples that I can find) , and then litter the blogosphere with her own logical fallacies, I’m going to point them out!

Judy’s labeling skeptics as “ideologues”, accusing them of having economic motives for their positions and posting “lawyerly” arguments without revealing what the objectional arguments are or might be is not a wonderfully logical position.

Particularly when none of us in here benefit monetarily from being skeptical (at least, most don’t). Follow the money and you’ll see who really benefits.

The problem as I see it is that AGW has been attacked by ideologues who know the answer (and AGW isn’t it), because they don’t like the economic implications of Kyoto. Competitive Enterprise Institute is a prime example in the ideologue category.

You somehow conclude that this means:

We are told their arguments should be dismissed because the people who advance them are a) ideologues and b) they are disposed to take the position they take.

My position is that you can say AGW has been attacked by ideologues without saying that all skeptics are ideologues. Geez, this should be quite obvious.

But I go a step further and say there are plenty of prominent skeptics who are ideologues, and who get rewarded handsomely. Take Pat Michaels, for example. He runs World Climate Report, funded by Western Fuels. Read WCR’s write up of Khilyuk and Chillangar (I muredered that spelling–sorry) for an example of the scientific integrity of that site. He erases Jim Hansen’s B and C scenarios when testifying to congress. And yet he has appeared on CNN more times than any other scientist with regard to climate change. Is he a skeptic, an ideologue, a lawyer or a shill? It hardly matters.

My position is that you can say AGW has been attacked by ideologues without saying that all skeptics are ideologues. Geez, this should be quite obvious.

Did anyone suggest Judy said all skeptics are are ideologues? I didn’t. Judy Curry said some unspecified people are skeptics and the arguments against AGW– which she does not describe — are motivated by economics. Evidently these unspecified people (though she provides an example) with unspecified financial motives and arguments Judy prefers not to reveal are “the problem”.

As to your discussion of Pat Michaels, if you have a rebuttal to any of his arguments, feel free to post the arguments for us, and explain why you believe they are wrong. Heck, if you think it’s important, start a blog so you can go on and on!

If your “argument” against his position is: “his report is funded by a fuel company”: Well, that’s the same ad hominem Judy used. Please contact Judy and I’ll sure she’ll provide you a link to one of her scholarly works explaining why ad hominems are bad. (You could also read ad hominem) .

FWIW, Judy seems to be burning quite a bit of carbon jetting around the country explaining what’s wrong with arguments based on these fallacies to climate researchers all across the country. I’m sure she’ll be happy to explain the problem with these fallacies to you.

re: 206“It does not take Connelly long to delete my entries.
Your reference paper author in 201 is Dr Gavin Schmidt — Dr Connelley deleted text and an article reference of yours to a Dr Schmidt paper? Was the delete without comment?

If click
Whitley Strieber, I think you’ll agree there is no way to “one up” the discovery of climate scientist and AGW advocate Whitley Strieber. (Note: As I said before, the fact that Mr. Strieber believes in climate change tells us nothing about the strength of any arguments for or against the hypothesis. I’m just mentioning Whitley for everyone’s amusement! 🙂 )

But it seems to me that choosing 1970 as a start date because of better data might be just fine, while choosing 1930 as the start date for increasing CO2 levels does not withstand the briefest scrutiny. The only thing interesting about 1930, CO2-wise, is that emissions go down during the first few years of the great depression. 1950 is when emissions start to ramp up. And guess what? When you look at the station data from 1950-2000, you get warming.

As you say, Boris, carbon dioxide emissions went down in the 1930s by way of the worldwide depression and were mostly level for the 1930s overall before starting to increase in the early 1940s and then from the 1950s on have gone up a rather steady rate. Instrumental measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere evidently had a start in the 1950/1960 time period.

Global and NH temperatures increased in the 1930s, decreased in the 1940s, stayed more or less level in the 1950s, and then decreased in the 1960s and 1970s before starting their current steady increase in the late 1970s/early 1980s. In light of these changes and carbon dioxide-wise, a 1930s start for temperature changes would not be so far off base, but like all choices of start dates it depends on what one is attempting to show — or unfortunately sometimes not show.

The importance of the local temperature/climate effects is something to which RPJr and RPSr have pointed in their writings. Global warming can be a very much different issue locally than the global averages would indicate. The CO2 publication gives a view of these local variations in temperature anomalies, albeit anecdotally and limited to those going against the increasing trend. I personally am more interested in temperature data that would allow me to check (or better yet to see that someone else has checked) the uncertainties (which are not small) that, for example, Phil Jones assigns to his published global average anomalies in consideration of the incomplete global coverage for temperature measurements.

I have made note of data being used in climate studies these days that can depend critically on the selection of starting dates for the conclusions drawn. Certainly cherry picking of data in general, which may well be inadvertent, has been shown here at CA to cloud the results of some published works and prompt the prudent reader to encourage more detailed sensitivity testing or even simply more awareness of the need for it.

Getting Research From the Lab to Market University Licensing and the Bayh-Dole Act
Atlanta (August 28, 2003) “¢’¬? Getting more university research out of the lab and into the real world to improve the quality of people’s lives sounds likes a good thing. However, the Bayh-Dole Act passed in 1980 to encourage more federally funded research to make the leap out of the lab has proved controversial. Bayh-Dole allows universities to patent and exclusively license federally funded inventions and appears to have fueled dramatic growth in university licensing over the last 20 years.

Critics charge that Bayh-Dole restricts future research on a technology, is unnecessary, and motivates researchers to pursue profitable areas of research, rather than “pure” basic research.

LONDON – Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and a previous chief executive at Goldman Sachs Asset Management have launched an investment firm to seek out companies taking a responsible stance on big global issues like climate change.

London-based Generation Investment Management has been set up to tap growing demand for an investment style which can generate returns by blending traditional equity research with a focus on more intangible non-financial factors such as social and environmental responsibility and corporate governance.

“This new approach is designed to serve people who want to integrate sustainable returns with traditional equity analysis,” Gore said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

Gore will be chairman of Generation, with David Blood – previously chief executive at Goldman’s fund arm – as managing partner.

Generation’s other founders include Mark Ferguson, a former co-head of pan-European research also at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who will be chief operating officer, and Peter Knight, a former campaign manager to ex-U.S. President Bill Clinton, who will be president of Generation in the United States.

The founders intend to contribute an unspecified amount to the fund’s start-up capital and have pledged to contribute five percent of its profits to a charitable foundation focused on exploring issues of sustainable economic growth.

Climate change is rising rapidly up investors’ agendas, underscored by last week’s decision by Russia to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to curb global warming, Gore said.

He added it is impossible to analyse auto company stocks properly, for example, without taking the issue of vehicle emission standards into account, particularly for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

“The carbon intensity of profits is an approach that needs to be adopted,” he said, referring to the practice of measuring how much carbon is used in producing energy. Gore, the former Democrat Party challenger for the U.S. Presidency in 2000, has been a long-standing campaigner on environmental issues such as vehicle emissions.

He intends to get involved in helping drive Generation’s investment process, although he added he would not directly choose investments. “I’m not a stock picker,” he said.

If us pure at heart can save the world and make some money at it that is a good thing. On the other hand, those others out there, who surely must not have our good intentions in mind or at heart, doing things that appear to be in their self interest, that must be a bad thing.

Of course, none of these self righteous observations have anything to do with the legitimacy of the arguments being put forth and in fact detract from the general discussions.

I have just watched David Attenborough’s new take on the GW and what it means for Britain and the world. Interesting in parts but ultimately up there dripping with Gore. Catastrophe by the end of the century if nothing is done. Namely heavily biased and totally without balance.
The Beeb initiated a SETI-like operation coupling pc’s worldwide to produce a suitable prophecy from models… I can’t say much about this except to say I’m dubious.

I shall keep the video on the shelf as a record of the time when all believed in runaway GW. It could all be a thing of the past in a couple of years.

I have skipped from 114 to the end of this ‘thread’ so I don’t know if my next offering is old hat. Re CO2 appearing 800 years after warming – I assumed it was due to land newly liberated of ice warming sufficiently to liberate CO2 and methane. The amounts in the atmosphere increase – then fall as the newly established forests reabsorbed the CO2.

“I have skipped from 114 to the end of this “thread’ so I don’t know if my next offering is old hat. Re CO2 appearing 800 years after warming – I assumed it was due to land newly liberated of ice warming sufficiently to liberate CO2 and methane. The amounts in the atmosphere increase -”

Lets not forget in a newly warmed world life flourishes, by that I mean critter life. CO2 is a sign of life. And 800 years seems like enough generations to stabalize the worldwide populations.

RE: #139 – You might want to, if you’ve not done so already, contact Roger Pielke Sr. He has been doing some analytical work vis a vis risk analysis and he has mentioned many times his interest in actuarial processes and algorithms. I don’t know exactly who are his contacts in the industry, but suffice it to say, he is obviously looking at the nitty gritty. Good luck!

Re: 221 I think decrease in the solubility of CO2 in a warmer ocean is the best candidate. It takes the ocean about 800 years to warm and turn over. It is mentioned here, but I have yet to find a good attempt to quantify it. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003EAEJA…..7942C

RE: #168 – Steve M that’s interesting. I’ve been casually following the various sea ice extent sites for about 18 months and have to say there are some wierd things in the outputs. Beyond the obvious glitches (where extent suddenly drops to zero for a day or few days) I see these less dramatic fall offs that seem to suddenly recover. Of course some of those are real wind driven extreme compression events (think massive pressure ridge formation) but some may also be errors in the measurement equipment or the filtering of the raw data. I also notice that the extent anomalies depicted for the indivual “basins” do not add up correctly to equal the overall NH anomaly. I reckon there is either overlap in the “basins” or some sort of overt error in the addition algorithm. Sigh …. yet one more thing in need of auditing!

#219
The former Vice President has a substantial equity stake in Occidental Petrolieum. He also
chagres a large fee for speaking engagements, and his travels are subsidized by a third party.
He did tell a reporter that he freely pays a self imposed carbon tax on the emissions caused
by his carbon based transportation (ie private Gulfstream jet). I’m not sure wo he pays, and
how much he doles out, but it does show that private firms will just pay what ever carbon tax
that is imposed, or pass it along to the consumer. It’s much like the salary cap and luxury tax
imposed by MLB. Steinbrenner just pays the tax (2006 was $26 million) while he spends 20-30%
more than what he is alloted.

I predict that the carbon taxed if approved will be like the EU VAT tax; it will grow yearly,
and will consume an ever greater share of the GDP. The economic impact will be severe, and politicians
will regret ever hearing the name Al Gore.

I’m not sure the ocean ever really warms very much. The thing is that to get water to sink it needs to denser (i.e. either be saltier or colder) than the water it’s sinking through.

Think about what this means: In more equatorial climes it means arid conditions and in polar regions it means things like melting ice. But there are only limited areas where it’s very dry over the oceans. And the more it evaporates from the ocean it clouder it gets and therefore the cooler the water both from the stance of reduced insolation and of evaporative cooling.

From what I’ve read most of the water which sinks deep does so in the polar regions where it’s first cooled to near freezing by various processes and then part of the water freezes and the rest, becoming more dense sinks. The latitude where this process occurs can move but the basic process is much the same and won’t make the deep water much warmer if at all. Note that this is different that the situation with respect to CO2 and it’s salts. They will become more soluble in the cold water and will then sink with the cold water in proportion to to the turn-over.

Does anyone know why measuring CO2 by a volcano is a good place to measure atmospheric CO2 as suggested by this link:

I’d assume the real-time CO2 analyzers would show large excursions when winds blew directly from the volcano as opposed to toward it, and researchers would see that in the record. Unless they’re using HTeam techniques…

Now for a fact. Khosla stuck his neck out and pushed a (failed) California ballot initiative which would have levied a tax on in-state petroleum extraction in order to fund “alternative energy” R&D. Interestingly, although KPCB are part of the “usual suspects” along Sand Hill road, for the purposes of Khosla’s interest, “alternative energy” is more geared toward agribusinesses in the Central Valley than it is to, say, T.J Rodgers’ and other semiconductor gurus’ work on photovoltaics. What a bizarre world we live in.

Back on one of my (and I believe, if not mistaken, David Smith’s) favorite topics, multidecadal oscillations / still poorly understood interactions between the WPac/EInd warm pool and global climate. Not to make anyone nervous, but we are overdue for a megadrought. Consider:

If one of the potential scenarios of the *current* changes in regime (e.g. multi decadal, multi oscillatory regime) plays out, we in the US and a number of other parts of the world are in for a real world of hurt. It will be blamed on “killer AGW” but will actually be one of those rolls of the oscillatory dice that has come up before and will come up again and again. And, it will cause far more pain to many of us than any of the realistic AGW scenarios now before us.

#236 SteveM , my friend, can I just say : Hello! that’s the point of all that stupid posting! Most of us don’t really care about such things, and it’s not fair to say money is the only thing that would make a smart person skeptical. Most smart people have money already. tee hee. 😉

I believe our thoughts are made up of energy. Lot’s of positive energy is found on CA and in abundance too. I thank you, my husband thanks you. Thanks to everyone who participates. Truly! We are also amazed at all the “smark cookies” who post here, as my dad would say. 🙂

#229 Okay, I’ll accept the south poll measurement, as there should be very little carbon sinks or sources at the south pool. The only sources I can see is melting ice. This provides a good sanity check for other measurements. My next question was why was the ice core data shifted 83 years to match up with the volcano data.

shouldn’t ice core data be fit to the actual atmospheric data though some curve fitting technique. Also, what is the justification for the amount of experimental atmospheric data that was thrown away pre 1885.

A trend fit to a PORTION of the output from “Hansen’s” model is NOT “Hansen’s trend.”

If you fit your trend to selected sub-portions of the time series, you get a different trend. If you add more years to the years of the model you are analyzing, you will get a different trend.

Your line fit is NOT the output of the model, it is a line fit to a portion of the noisy time series that is the output of the model, and it has an error. Not error of the model itself, which you say Hansen has said isn’t quantified, but the error of the line fit to a portion of the output of the model.

Hansen himself reports trend slopes for the comparison of his model and the observed temperatures, for the ‘predicted’ period after his original testimony – they are a very, very close fit. I cited this. You report your slopes in 0.1C, when the underlying data can be read off the graph (as you did) in units of 0.01C, thus adding “measurement” error of about an order of magnitude – when I pointed this pout, you sneered about understanding significant figures.

When people keep repeating this kind of absurdity and calling it explanation, and sneering at me when I point out that it isn’t a correct explanation, I start to doubt the source.

And you did in fact reset the baseline of Hansen’s results, by using only the last of 50 years of data that Hansen had generated to calibrate that baseline, thus throwing out 98% of the calibration period data. When pressed on this, you professed not to know anything about that methodology – gee – and then when pressed harder, dropped the subject and diverted to the ‘trend’ argument.

I find your calculation of the sensitivity confusing, too – to say the least. 342 W/m^2 is the power that comes from the Sun as radiation, and it is essentially equal to the radiation emitted by Earth. If there is a misbalance here, it is less than 1W/m^2 if averaged annually.

My calculation of the sensitivity doesn’t have to do with the power that comes from the sun. It relates the downwelling IR. This is given in the Kiehl/Trenberth paper Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget as being about 325 W/m2. This figure, while approximate, is not disputed as far as I know. It is also in agreement with the analysis on your site.

The analysis on your site, while mathematically 100% correct, simplifies the actual flows by only giving the net flows. While this gives the right terms for the reservoirs (since inbound and outbound flows cancel out), it does not give the size of the flows. And it is the size of these flows (the downward radiation flux) which are of interest to us.

Finally, although the change in forcing varies logarithmically with the concentration of the absorber, the climate sensitivity does not (at least to a first approximation). It is linear or quasi-linear. We are not interested in how many CO2 or H20 or methane doublings it has taken us to get to 325 W/m2, just in the temperature change which is linear to a first approximation. Thus, the calculation of 33°C change from 325 W/m2 change = ~ 0.1°C per W/m2 is a valid approximation.

However, the actual change at present is almost sure to be less than that, because of increased parasitic losses (convection, evaporation, transpiration, and hydrometeors) with increasing temperature.

Or at least, that’s how I see it … but I hate to disagree with a man with your abilities. Let me know.

Lee, I gotta say, I love the way you AGW guys discuss things. Hansen ran his model for 100 years at the 1958 conditions, to get it as close as he could to the 1958 conditions. I think that since that is the case, he should compare it directly with the 1958 data, not start it at some other point. I got tired of trying to explain why the models and the data should start at the same value, and it was not central to my point, which was that his results did not reflect reality. So I pointed out that the trends of Hansen’s results were all above the trend of the actual data.

Now, you are claiming that I “dropped the subject and diverted to the “trend’ argument,” as though somehow I had been proven wrong or revealed my ignorance, when in fact it didn’t matter in the slightest to my underlying argument, it just showed why his graphic was misleading.

This tactic, of seizing upon every change of subject and claiming it as a huge victory, is actually quite funny. This is what Tamino did on his blog. He objected to my calling the DLR “greenhouse” radiation. I said OK, fine, doesn’t matter to me, let’s call it DLR … then he claimed that change was evidence of my ignorance and my backtracking on what I had said. Riiight …

The fact remains that Hansen picked the three scenarios in such a way that he thought they would bracket the actual trend, and they did not “¢’¬? the trend of each and every one of Hansen’s scenarios, A, B, and C, is above (and in two of the three cases, well above) the actual trend of the instrumental record. You can spin that any way you want, Lee, but I will leave you to do that yourself. Report back when you can show that Hansen’s ‘too high, too low, and just right’ scenarios did in fact bracket the instrumental record.

w.

PS – As a bonus, report back to us on the difference between the error associated with the trend of a stochastic series, and of a deterministic series of data.

Jqye Bass (244). An interesting link, but are you suggesting we should doubt the concensus which tells us:

– Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: “This isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

At least they are not leaving the most critical conclusions in the hands of the wishy-washey scientists: “the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by government officials for several days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.”

“Global warming is “happening now, it’s very obvious,” said Mahlman, a former director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in Boulder, Colo. “When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.”
– Yes why bother with the expensive IPCC report, its obvious!

Re # 245 What happens if Earth enters a 5 or 10 year period of unchanging temperatures or (horrors) slight cooling, for entirely natural reasons like a low amplitude ocean oscillation? I think that hype like Weaver’s would become a big liability.

5)Last Summer someone at the IPCC leaked a downward revision of expected 2100 global surface temps (an expected rise of 2 deg C, not the expected 3.5 to 4.0 deg C rise). Was that just a trial baloon to see what the reaction would be?

6)How much of the recent upswing in tropical storms be incorporated into the report? Will there be a bias for those scientists who allege a linkage between PDIs of NATL and AGW?

What happens if Earth enters a 5 or 10 year period of unchanging temperatures or (horrors) slight cooling, for entirely natural reasons like a low amplitude ocean oscillation? I think that hype like Weaver’s would become a big liability.

Simple:
(1) hype how all of the measures we’ve taken to reduce GHG emissions have slowed the warming, and hype how much more is necessary
(2) come up with alternative explanation for why the warming hasn’t appeared (some sort of phase shift that will reverse itself, aerosols, etc)
(3) remind people that 5-10 yrs is just a blip on the timeline (inconsistent with all the “worst year ever” stuff they spout, but who ever said they weren’t hypocrites?)
(4) warn that the warming “in the pipeline” over that period (Hanson’s pet phrase, I think) will hit us very hard when it comes all at once (instead of gradually occurring as expected)

“It is very likely that … greenhouse gas increases (from human activities) caused most of the globally average temperature increases since the mid-20th century,” one source who had seen the draft quoted it as saying.

The 2001 report defined “very likely” as a 90-99 percent probability and “likely” as a 66-90 percent chance.

The new report means narrower ground for skeptics to argue that natural variations, such as in the sun’s output, are to blame rather than emissions from burning oil, coal and gas.

Translation: it’s 90-99% likely that over 50% of the warming since the middle of the 20th century has been due to human activities. So that would put it around 25% of the 20th century warming, about 0.25 deg C. That’s it?

Today everything will change (for the worse). George W. Bush will set forth his State of the Union address to both Houses of the US Congress. In it, he will, albeit in somewhat muted fashion, echo the utterings of Blair, Merkel and Moon vis a vis “drastic action” in response to the reputed threat of “killer AGW.” With that, the last shards of data driven decision making in the public policy sphere will be broken away from the frame. We will truly be voices in the wilderness. That having been written, to quote Churchill, never, never, never give up.

“They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several days next week and released to the public on February 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.”

Oh great! So this means that like the previous versions of the IPCC, the summary and the report don’t necessarily have to agree, and by the time anyone realizes it they will have “moved on” to other issues. Geesh.. Why not release the report first, then the summary.

If anyone would like to understand what lies in store, as the fraud gets baked into the system even more, think back to the 1970s and the US “synfuels” debacle, but on a much grander scale. From the standpoint of solving multiple problems at the same time, what would make the most sense would be advanced R&D on coal based technologies (both clean burning of it directly including bio fixation of CO2 emissions using algae yielding further fuel as well as conversion of coal to other products) and nuclear power. But instead, we are going to waste our time on draconian nanny state imposition of underpowered unsafe vehicles, artificially contrived scarcity and cap and trade ponzi schemes. There will be a huge boondoggle related to ethanol and meanwhile biodiesel will be largely overlooked (at least in the US). Photovoltaic work will continue to receive little attention as will tidal and ocean thermal gradient work. What a joke.

“A draft of the United Nations report by 600 scientists says it is “very likely” that human activities are the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, strengthening a conclusion in their last study in 2001 that the human link was “likely”.

What happened to the other 1400 scientists? Did they retire? Get voted off the island? Become skeptics?

“Hansen ran his model for 100 years at the 1958 conditions, to get it as close as he could to the 1958 conditions. ”

Once more, willis – no. That is incorrect, at least as you apply it.

He ran for 100 years – the first 50 to “spool up” the model, and the next 50 to establish the baseline. That was nto done to arrive at a final single best year – THERE IS NO SINGLE BEST YEAR ANYWHERE IN THOSE 50 YEARS. Every year of that 50 years consists of the ‘climate’ value with annual deviations overlain on it. The final year, the one you choose to align, has the ‘climate’ value, AND AN OVERLAIN ANNUAL VARIATION. What Hansen did was take the mean of those 50 years, so as to “average out” annual variation, and reduce as much as possible the impact of single-year annual variation on the alignment. IIRC, Hansen did a similar thing for observed temperatures, using the 1958 value of a fit to the observed temperatures as his baseline, also to minimize the effect of annual variation on the ‘climate’ signal.

By taking the mean of those 50 years as the base, Hansen minimized the effect of annual variation in initializing the alignment. By choosing to align to that one single final year, you add into the alignment the entirety of the annual deviation for that one year. Since 1958 was a warm year, that has the effect in your alignment of depressing the entire subsequent temperature record by an amount equal to the annual variation in 1958. That is, in your alignment, you carefully put into the entire trace an offset equal to the annual annual variation from a single year, 1958 – and then you disparage Hansen for the careful steps he took to remove effects of annual variation from the alignment.

I say you dropped this subject because I have re-raised it at least twice since then, with no response on point since. And STILL no on-point response – you continue to treat that ‘final’ 1958 value as if it is somehow a single best year at the end of the 50 year calibration period – it is not.
—
I have now pointed out to you at least twice that Hansen in his latest paper on that result, does report slopes of the trend for observed and for “B” forward from the time of his initial testimony – ie, over the ‘predicted’ period. I cited ita t least once, with a link. He reports these to 3 sig figs, and he included confidence intervals for BOTH – so much for your claim that he doesn’t believe there are error bars in a line fit to the model results. Observed and “B” are very, very close to each other. You have not responded, anywhere that I’ve seen, to that – including right here, now.

wilis, your approach requires you to attribute all downwelling IR to CO2 and CO2-related greenhouse gasses, or to greenhouse gasses that have effects nearly co-linear with these. Water is the dominant overall greenhouse gas in the earth’s atmosphere, and to assume that greenhouse effect of water vapor is colinear with CO2 forcing over this range of 33C is naive to the point of absurdity.

Lee, I am going to inquire again about whether you can comment on the the following aspects of Hansen’s scenarios A, B and C and their utilization in evaluting the computer model that produced them.

1. The scenarios depend on the potential changes or lack of them in the factors that the models relate to temperature changes. Therefore for these scenarios to accurately predict temperatures in the future they have to fulfill the requirement of not only using inputs to estimate future temperatures, but to also estimate the future inputs.

2. In order to evaluate Hansen’s scenarios, vis a vis the computer model capabilities, one needs to separate out the problems related to predicting inputs (which are not insignificant). Would you agree that of most importance in determining how the computer performs is how it handles the inputs it is given and not necessarily in estimating what they will be?

3. Instead of presenting the performance evaluation in real times (out-of-sample) with these scenarios, why not use historical inputs into a fixed computer model and then compare its estimations with the real temperatures (or other climate features)?

4. Are there known lag time and equilibration issues with seeing the result of input changes on temperature/climate? Hansen’s scenario that shows a flattening of temperature with a sudden reduction in GHG emissions would seem to indicate the response (although not necessarily in complete equilibrium) is relatively rapid. Do you agree?

5. In other words as some scientist noted earlier (I think it may have been RPJr or RPSr), it does not tell us much about the computer model capabilities even if one the scenarios were shown to be reasonably correct if it did it by using the wrong inputs. How say you on that observation?

Hansen’s outputs from the late 80’s model run is not, as Hansen himself says, proof that this model is valid, and does not tell us anything about the predictive capabilities of the later and presumable ‘better’ models. It does need to be checked against actual emissions and forcings (which turn out top be greater in some ways, lower on others, but not overall expressed as probable total forcing, all that different from teh predicted scenario B), as opposed to projected emissions, and the time series is not yet long enough for solid statistical analysis.

What is being claimed by Hansen and others is that this late 80s model run, with a comparatively archaic model, does not as a few others are claiming deviate enough from actual observed temperatures to show that the model is invalid. IOW, they arent saying these results (yet?) shows that the model is clearly ‘right’, they are saying there is no reason based on this data to say that the model is fundamentally ‘wrong,’ while acknowledging the imitations of that 20 YEAR OLD MODEL and that there is as yet insufficient data to say that the observed temps are not deviating from Scenario B.

What willis and others are claiming is that it does deviate enough to invalidate that model – and then to further use this to imply that all the models after that nearly-20-year-old run are therefore also suspect. He gets this ‘deviation’ by offsetting the baseline – throwing out 98% of the alignment run data to do so – or by among other things claiming that a line fit to the noisy output of that model has no confidence interval, and obscuring the actual ‘difference’ by reducing number of sig figs, while ignoring conflicting published data that says that observed and “B” do have very similar trends.

I have now pointed out to you at least twice that Hansen in his latest paper on that result, does report slopes of the trend for observed and for “B” forward from the time of his initial testimony – ie, over the “predicted’ period. I cited ita t least once, with a link.

Lee, I’ve looked for your cite and can’t find it. Please re-cite it.

Regarding the 50 yr vs 100 yr spoolup, as I said before, it is immaterial to the question, which is why I stopped discussing it before, and won’t re-enter the debate now.

Computer models normally are not tested against past results with confidence limits attached and you do not see them published. We have “scenario” predictions out-of-sample for 18 or 19 years for Hansen’s model which do not give much data for looking at its performance statistically as Hansen has admitted, but a bigger issue than that is what specifically where the inputs used for the scenarios and how specifically did they differ from the actual conditions. As I recall, his Scenario B had GHG inputs significantly higher than actually occurred. Statements can be made in general that Scenario B is “close” to actual conditions, but we need more specific details on these items.

The other point that I find critical and unanswered here is what are the equilibrium effects and rates and what how much do we attribute shear momentum to the near term predictions.

Another point that was not discussed in my post above is what I call the Stock Investing Gimmick and that is to give out a number of predictions at a time in the past and publish and remind only about the successful ones in some future time. We need to know how many other predictions were made by the same group of people (perhaps it was none) back in time as those other predictions have to be used to adjust the statistics.

pnas
“Observed warming (Fig. 2) is comparable to that simulated for scenarios B and C, and smaller than that for scenario A. Following refs. 18 and 14, let us assess “predictions” by comparing simulated and observed temperature change from 1988 to the most recent year. Modeled 1988–2005 temperature changes are 0.59, 0.33, and 0.40°C, respectively, for scenarios A, B, and C. Observed temperature change is 0.32°C and 0.36°C for the land–ocean index and meteorological station analyses, respectively.

Warming rates in the model are 0.35, 0.19, and 0.24°C per decade for scenarios A, B. and C, and 0.19 and 0.21°C per decade for the observational analyses. Forcings in scenarios B and C are nearly the same up to 2000, so the different responses provide one measure of unforced variability in the model. Because of this chaotic variability, a 17-year period is too brief for precise assessment of model predictions, but distinction among scenarios and comparison with the real world will become clearer within a decade.

Close agreement of observed temperature change with simulations for the most realistic climate forcing (scenario B) is accidental, given the large unforced variability in both model and real world. Indeed, moderate overestimate of global warming is likely because the sensitivity of the model used (12), 4.2°C for doubled CO2, is larger than our current estimate for actual climate sensitivity, which is 3 ± 1°C for doubled CO2, based mainly on paleoclimate data (17). More complete analyses should include other climate forcings and cover longer periods. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the first transient climate simulations (12) proved to be quite accurate, certainly not “wrong by 300%” (14). The assertion of 300% error may have been based on an earlier arbitrary comparison of 1988–1997 observed temperature change with only scenario A (18). Observed warming was slight in that 9-year period, which is too brief for meaningful comparison.”
——–

50 vs 100 years is immaterial, but that isnt what I was disputing, was it.

50 years mean value vs. the one single annual value you used is the entire basis of your readjustment of the baseline of the baseline, and is not only not immaterial, it is THE basis of what you did when you moved the baseline,a nd it is THE basis of contention over your moving that baseline.

He reports these [trends] to 3 sig figs, and he included confidence intervals for BOTH – so much for your claim that he doesn’t believe there are error bars in a line fit to the model results.

Hansen says:

Warming rates in the model [post 1988] are 0.35, 0.19, and 0.24°C per decade for scenarios A, B. and C, and 0.19 and 0.21°C per decade for the observational analyses.

This is not 3 significant figures, only two. More to the point, I find nothing about confidence intervals for either the model results or the data. Perhaps you could say where these are reported.

Hansen says the observed warming “is comparable to” Scenario B … which means what, exactly? Scenario C is the closest, but only because CO2 emissions went to zero in that scenario in 2000, so it is useless for comparison.

You also say:

wilis, your approach requires you to attribute all downwelling IR to CO2 and CO2-related greenhouse gasses, or to greenhouse gasses that have effects nearly co-linear with these. Water is the dominant overall greenhouse gas in the earth’s atmosphere, and to assume that greenhouse effect of water vapor is colinear with CO2 forcing over this range of 33C is naive to the point of absurdity.

Where did I say that all downwelling IR is from “CO2 and CO2-related greenhouse gasses”? I am talking about temperature change from downwelling IR, not the source. The downwelling IR is from all greenhouse gases, including water vapor. This downwelling IR is about 325 W/m2, and has caused a temperature rise of about 33°C. This is about 0.1°C per W/m2. Please explain why whether “water vapor is colinear with CO2 forcing over this range of 33C” has any effect on the total downwelling IR.

Willis quoted Lee as, “to assume that greenhouse effect of water vapor is colinear with CO2 forcing over this range of 33C is naive to the point of absurdity.”

I have the vapor pressure vs. temperature data for water over the range -20 to 100 C. Over the shorter range of -17 to +15 C, i.e., the 33 C of Earth greenhouse, the line is curved, but a linear fit produces an R^2 of 0.936. Even at the extremes, the line is good to within about 20%.

Over a more reasonable range of temps for a local CO2-increase-resulting-temp calculation, i.e., from 14-20 C, the straight line fit R^2 is 0.998. So, the assumption of linear response is fairly reasonable to very reasonable over the entire range of temperatures of interest.

Frequency domain weight. I was wondering what threads would be best to discuss frequency domain weighting. I was thinking lately about how similar some of the signals were in MBH98 and I was wondering which part of the frequency domain the signals might be more orthogonal in. This also got me thinking about other forms of weighting. For instance how quickly the phase angle changes could be one form of weighting. The slower the phase angle changes in the coherence function the more degrees of freedom there are for that part of the frequency domain. Nonlinear weighting could also be of interest. Regions of the frequency domain with close to unity coherence could perhaps be weighted more then regions with near zero coherence.http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/mdft/Coherence_Function.html

willis, I’m looking for the paper I remember with the confidence intervals. If I misremembered, I will apologize – but this is a side issue, not the substance.

The fact is that scenario B and observed are nearly dead on, and this is the substance of the argument – this is what you disputed. Trend in oC/decade for “B” is 0.19, and observed is 0.19 – 0.21. Scenario C is not closest – it is 0.24.

Nonlinear actions and interactions of gasses across that temperature regime affect whether one can legitimately simply partition 33C across all of the observed downwelling. Quite simply, that argument approaches ‘crank’ territory.

The first 20 ppm of carbon dioxide produces 1.5 degrees of warming, which is more warming than the following 400 ppm. From the current level of 380 ppm, each extra 20 ppm is worth 0.02 degrees. At our current rate of 1.3 ppm extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the earth’s atmosphere might be warming at 0.0015 degrees per annum. And it might not be, due to negative biological feedbacks. This data was generated using the MODTRAN site. The earth is cooling from the HWP at least as fast as that.

The technology for converting coal to oil has been available since the 1930’s. The Germans used it during WWII when they ran out of oil to produce fuel for their tanks. Apparently, the break-even point is around $35/barrel, and with oil at $55/barrel, it would be attractive. The problem is that it costs around $2.5 billion to make the plant. And so far, no one has been willing to pony up the money because if the price drop s below $35/barrel, then the plant becomes unprofitable.

Since the Feds are always willing to pony up cash for others, you’d think they would provide the guarantees on these type of plants that should oil fall below the cost threshold, they would make up the difference. Based on what they would save in fuel purchases, I can’t understand why they won’t do it.

Obviously, Hansen’s model forecast released in 1999 has been proven to be wrong.

1998 is still the warmest year and the observed temperatures have fallen below Hansen’s most optimistic prediction – Scenario C – in which greenhouse gases were supposed to stop increasing in the year 2000.

It is good, however, that he released his predictions so that obejective people can now look back and know that his model is wrong.

Since he is the “star” of the global warming modelling community, it is a little disconcerting that someone isn’t trying to fix the runaway greenhouse hysteria within the community.

1998 is still the warmest year and the observed temperatures have fallen below Hansen’s most optimistic prediction – Scenario C – in which greenhouse gases were supposed to stop increasing in the year 2000.

Not according to GISS, where Hansen works — 2005 was warmer than 1998 by a split hair. (Not speaking to the scenarios.)

Close agreement of observed temperature change with simulations for the most realistic climate forcing (scenario B) is accidental, given the large unforced variability in both model and real world.

Lee, this is what Hansen says about his own model predictions and is more in line with my observations that getting the “correct” answer accidentally says nothing positive about the models capabilities to predict temperatures. The lack of CIs in Hansen’s writings is also of consequence — and by the way you did make a rather big deal of this issue in many many posts.

FT’s Chief Alarmist, Fiona Harvey, today exagerated the warm winter in the far Eastern US and Europe to be “a warmer than normal winter in the Northern Hemisphere.” I suppose the usual bogus methods of somehow “averaging” surface readings might indeed say “warmer than normal NH.” I won’t even go down that road right now, a discussion for another day. But I will go down this one:

A-hem ……

I guess Asia is not part of the Northern Hemisphere. Nor is the Western US.

281: Lubos: right, the first tick is 2,000 years, and the cooling could be 50 years from now. But the repeating shapes of the cycles and my super powers :)enable me to predict that it is less than that. Solar cycle 25 is expected to be very weak, so maybe the cooling is 10 years out (that is “soon” in my view). Of course, by then I’ll be forced to ride a bicycle, since fossil fuels will be banned.

I am not sure why Hansen’s three scenarios where run in computer models the way that I surmise they were run. I would expect if I were to make predictions about three different scenarios I would make a computer run at the starting point 1988 and run it three different times under the differing conditions of the three scenarios with a logical comparison of the start temperature (all the same for all three of the scenarios) to the three scenario temperatures at the end dates.

We make a 100-year control run and perform experiments for three scenarios of atmospheric composition. These experiments begin in 1958 and include measured or estimated changes in atmospheric CO2, CH4, H2O, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and stratospheric aerosols for the period from 1958 to the present. Scenario A assumes continued exponential trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear growth of trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000.

and looking at Figure 2, one sees that the three scenarios under identical conditions do not follow an identical trend/path on the graph leading up to 1988 and in fact to do start at observed temperature in 1958. Now I am sure that some of this was performed the way it was because that was the nature of making computer runs, but to my mind it puts uncertainties and complexities into the comparison that need not have been there.

willis, I’m looking for the paper I remember with the confidence intervals. If I misremembered, I will apologize – but this is a side issue, not the substance.

The fact is that scenario B and observed are nearly dead on, and this is the substance of the argument – this is what you disputed. Trend in oC/decade for “B” is 0.19, and observed is 0.19 – 0.21. Scenario C is not closest – it is 0.24.

Nonlinear actions and interactions of gasses across that temperature regime affect whether one can legitimately simply partition 33C across all of the observed downwelling. Quite simply, that argument approaches “crank’ territory.

Since you have been so vehement that model results have confidence intervals, and since you so emphatically made the totally bogus claim that:

He reports these to 3 sig figs, and he included confidence intervals for BOTH – so much for your claim that he doesn’t believe there are error bars in a line fit to the model results.

I find that your sudden conversion to the idea that this is a side issue to be curiously timed … but I await your apology. More than an apology, however, I’d like to you to reconsider your repeated claims that you are 100% right and we are all somehow misguided. You don’t know how to count significant figures, but you are more than willing to lecture us about them.

I now see, however, why we are reporting differing results regarding Hansen. Your reported numbers only cover a small part of the computer run, from 1988 on. As Hansen says, this is too short a time to determine anything. But when we look at the full run from 1958 onwards, which I have been discussing since day one (see my original post on the subject) it is clear that his results are significantly different from the observations. This is true even with the artificially inflated GISS “observational data”. Your use of only the last few years of the run is curious, given that you said above,

A trend fit to a PORTION of the output from “Hansen’s” model is NOT “Hansen’s trend.”

I agree with you, which is why I have used the entire 1958- output from Hansen’s model, not just the last bit as you have done.

Finally, the Earth’s surface doesn’t know whether a W/m2 comes from CO2, H2O, or CH4. Let me say again that we are not looking at where the downwelling IR radiation comes from, just at how much of it there is. If a giant infrared bedroom heater in the sky were putting out 325 W/m2 which heated the earth by 33°C, the situation would be the same “¢’¬? the average heating per W/m2 would still be about 0.1°C per W/m2.

willis, I’m looking for the paper I remember with the confidence intervals. If I misremembered, I will apologize – but this is a side issue, not the substance.

The fact is that scenario B and observed are nearly dead on, and this is the substance of the argument – this is what you disputed. Trend in oC/decade for “B” is 0.19, and observed is 0.19 – 0.21. Scenario C is not closest – it is 0.24.

Nonlinear actions and interactions of gasses across that temperature regime affect whether one can legitimately simply partition 33C across all of the observed downwelling. Quite simply, that argument approaches “crank’ territory.

Since you have been so vehement that model results have confidence intervals, and since you so emphatically made the totally bogus claim that:

He reports these to 3 sig figs, and he included confidence intervals for BOTH – so much for your claim that he doesn’t believe there are error bars in a line fit to the model results.

I find that your sudden conversion to the idea that this is a side issue to be curiously timed … but I await your apology. More than an apology, however, I’d like to you to reconsider your repeated claims that you are 100% right and we are all somehow misguided. You don’t know how to count significant figures or account for the difference between deterministic and stochastic datasets, but you are more than willing to lecture us about them.

I now see, however, why we are reporting differing results regarding Hansen. Your reported numbers only cover a small part of the computer run, from 1988 on. As Hansen says, this is too short a time to determine anything. But when we look at the full run from 1958 onwards, which I have been discussing since day one (see my original post on the subject) it is clear that his results are significantly different from the observations. This is true even with the artificially inflated GISS “observational data”. Your use of only the last few years of the run is curious, given that you said above,

A trend fit to a PORTION of the output from “Hansen’s” model is NOT “Hansen’s trend.”

I agree with you, which is why I have used the entire 1958- output from Hansen’s model, not just the last bit as you have done.

Finally, the Earth’s surface doesn’t know whether a W/m2 comes from CO2, H2O, or CH4. Let me say again that we are not looking at where the downwelling IR radiation comes from, just at how much of it there is. If a giant infrared bedroom heater in the sky were putting out 325 W/m2 which heated the earth by 33°C, the situation would be the same “¢’¬? the average heating per W/m2 would still be about 0.1°C per W/m2.

Sheesh. This article is a perfect example of how the facts get twisted into the Hollywood version. Think I could email that teacher, who cannot find any information, and point her to a few good geology books and websites? 😉

Please, Boris, leave Lee to make his own mistakes. It’s not necessary to add yours, he’s doing quite well on his own. My point had nothing to do with the spoolup, so the spoolup, whether 50 years or 5000, was immaterial to the question.

Hi, I’ve been arguing AGW with the folks at the SciAm blog and we got into the validity of the MWP. As I was looking into it I became intrigued by sunspot number reconstructions. As I couldn’t find a comparison between the SN and global temp reconstructions, I created one myself. The guy I’m debating on SciAm said he couldn’t understand it but it looks pretty conclusive to me. Would some of you check out this graph and tell me if it makes any sense?

This post was originally submitted in the wrong topic so I moved it here. But in the meantime, Willis replied to it:

Chris, it’s interesting, but until you put some units on the vertical scale and identify the sources of the ice core temperature data, not much can be said about your graph. Ask again when it’s fixed.

The original sunspot reconstruction (along with the link to the paper in PDF) is here

Is it necessary to show units on the vertical scale? To my mind the only important unit is time. The point of interest is that over 1000 years, the Moberg, Mann and sunspot curves seem to track pretty convincingly. But if more references are needed, my post at the bottom of the comments in the link I gave above has them.

Out of curiosity, has anyone sat down and watched An Inconvenient Truth with a timer in hand? I got the impression that at least 1/3 of the ninety minutes was devoted to things like Gore discussing losing the 2000 election, Gore driving past cows on his dad’s farm, Gore discussing his childhood, Gore discussing the death of his son, Gore musing about tobacco while standing in rickety old barn, Gore joking about his not knowing how to get the man-lift to work, etc.

Am I incorrect? Or did this sort “nothing to do with global climate change” type of material take up a lot of time?

As it happens, I almost think if you edited the movie to highlight the portions having to do with climate science only, inserted view graphs with relevant question after each snippet on climate change and the classed paused to discuss the snippet, you could create a fairly decent educational film. But as it stands, there is a huge amount of time devoted to entirely non-science stuff.

Unless you believe there is no year to year variation in an unchanging climate.

Boris, I doubt that is what you meant. I think what you meant was with no changes in the inputs that are assumed to effect the climate into the model or real world one would still expect to see variations in temperature and othe climate outputs. I think it is of interest to look at the lead up to 1988 with Hansen’s 3 scenarios and observe that his scenario that yields the largest temperature anomaly (after changing inputs into the 3 scenarios in 1988) also leads the other 2 scenarios up to 1988. The lead up inputs were identical as I read what was done in this experiment.

In other words, 3 scenarios (or better, 3 model runs) would lead to different temperature outputs with identical inputs. I’d be interested in seeing what 3 control runs would yield over the entire 100 year period (and why that was not presented in the report). It certainly bears on the statistical analysis of out-of-sample performances.

Re#294,
A propoganda film is useless if it cannot bring the viewer in. It would quickly turn boring. The sort of stuff you talk about attempts to give Gore credibility (almost president of the most powerful nation in the world), innocence (childhood), sympathy/empathy and humanity (son), relationship with common man (tobacco & barn), a personality and sense of humor (man-lift), etc.

If it were just an educational piece, it would be relegated to classroom boredom, and Al Gore is no Troy McClure.

Hi Steve S. et al. Finally something I can speak to with some authority, the quote being:

“… never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
— Winston Churchill, Oct29’41, Harrow School

A friend of mine mentioned he heard David Suzuki the other day say that there is not a single peer-reviewed paper against GW. I believe I saw here recently a link to a list, but can’t find it – could anyone help? Thank you. (Is DS being clever in saying “GW” when he knows everyone thinks he means “AGW”?)

RE: #302 – Only in non BRIC countries. You don’t see any of the riders of smoke belching two stroke engine powered vehicles in the BRIC world worrying about any of this. They worry about getting turned into road pizzas by a dump trucks and getting sick from drinking the wrong glass of water.

What I meant was moving the baseline on Hansen’s graph intrroduces yearly variability into the model runs.

I think what you meant here is that the yearly variability gets pushed around when you move the base line from left to right or right to left — the variability stays the same.

Willis E’s original post was an attempt to address the issue of using differing starting temperatures and I agree that that can be issue, but I see it as an inherent problem and uncertainity in the way the scenarios were run by Hansen. I am glad that Willis E brought up these issues, as the discussion made me think more about what it was that Hansen actually did in his experiment and how to interpret it.

The only way I can comprehend what was done is that when a computer model is run (as a control if you will) with identical inputs it gives different results with not insignificant temperature output variations from year to year. What we are then really looking at is a variability from computer run to computer run and this presents a problem in interpreting results when 3 separtate scenarios that require three separate runs. A more instructive method would have been running each scenario multiple times and looking at those differences within the scenario versus the average differences between the scenarios. Hansen does not even bother to talk about such a method or the implications.

Given that Hansen ran his experiment as I would prefer I would continue to have a problem with the scenario appraoch as they can tell as much or more about the inputs guessed at as they do about the model capabilities. And it was RPJr who commented in the original thread that a good prediction is one the gets the prediction right using the right inputs.

I would like to talk about these broader aspects of the Hansen experiment with you and Lee, but whenever I broach it I only hear about how Willis E said this or that.

Boris, Hansen believes that his models do a good job forecasting the future. I took a look at his results, and I found that the forecasts/hindcasts that he published in 1988 for the period 1958-2100 were already well off of the rails, with all three of them having trends greater than HadCRUT3 instrumental data.

The poorness of his results was masked in his graphic because he did not start all of the lines at the same point. However, that’s just the graphic, not the results. These are trends, which are independent of the starting point.

This also means that they are independent of whether a 50 year or 5000 year startup run is used. My apologies for the condescension, but you dropped into the middle of a long-standing disagreement without doing your homework. The issue is whether Hansen’s model is “skillful”, in the sense of being able to accurately hindcast/forecast temperatures. It is not able to do either.

Re #314 The recent Iceland/Greenland sea ice is shown here . The red and yellow are areas of +50% coverage.

The best chance of bridging looks to be in the next four weeks. The Arctic Oscillation (AO) forecast is for negative values in the next several weeks. The red line on the top graph is the forecast. Negative AO values are associated with winds that favor greater ice extent.

That said, I doubt the bridge will form this year. I think the last bridge was in the early 1980s, so it’s unusual.

And speaking of Arctic ice, I wish Steve B had accepted my bet about sea ice extent at the end of January and February.

The current Arctic ice extent is the red line on this chart . It appears to be about 0.5 million km2 greater than at this time last year. With the Arctic Oscillation (AO) becoming negative, the extent may well increase.

I expect the AO index to remain negative well into February, which gives a good chance that ice extent at the end of February will also be greater than in 2006.

Does this mean Arctic ice extent is stable or increasing? Of course not. It simply shows that ice moves and wind matters. Snapshots aren’t worth much.

So as the “science ist settled” definitely, we’re 90% shure about CO2 and AGW, why not stop those very expensive computer models and send those scientists out in the fields to manually harrvest the crop and corn?
Maybe the Amish would be happy to be our new driver teachers…
Or will those scientist suddenly argue that there are still many uncertainties about AGW, which they are so reluctant to mention up to now?

David Smith, you have posted here a plenty of interesting weather/ice etc. links. Thanks for those! I just had a thought that could it be possible to collect all those to a web page? Here’s my addition. Fromhttp://www.fimr.fi/stc/itamerikanta/attachments/jaakartta.pdf
you see the current ice situation in Baltic Sea. Right now it seems that the ice is closing between Umeàƒ⣠and Vaasa, which usually means rapid freezing of the Bothnian Bay. So it seems that the Bothnian Bay is going to get frozen once again (as far it is known, it has always happened. They have detailed records back to 1720.) unlike an alarmist predicted just about two weeks ago.

A more instructive method would have been running each scenario multiple times and looking at those differences within the scenario versus the average differences between the scenarios.

Perhaps this would be more instructive, but I would guess that 1988 computing power would make this approach impractical. The models should show variability even with static parameters since this is the way the climate behaves.

Given that Hansen ran his experiment as I would prefer I would continue to have a problem with the scenario appraoch as they can tell as much or more about the inputs guessed at as they do about the model capabilities

True, but this is the nature of complex predictions. Given that the total GHG forcing predicted by Hansen in scenario B is quite accurate, I don’t see what the problem is.

And if Hansen’s results were so poor, why was his scenario A compared with reality in 1998 congressional testimony?

Slightly off topic from the rest of this discussion (that is what this thread is for, right?)

Recently, scientists are very quick to blame any measurement that doesn’t agree with what they expected in the first place on global warming, or climate change, probably because it is a great way to grab headlines and get more funding.

Here’s a shocker though: whilst the “consensus” (groan) of scientific opinion was that climate change wiped out the giant marsupials, a recent discovery (quite literally a mine of information…) has shown that these theories were absolute rubbish, and that the species survived the very worst extremes of climate that were thrown at them:

Re #322 It looks like the Baltic region is now entering a cooldown, with temperatures of -10C to -20C over the next weeks. I imagine the Baltic ice will expand over the next six weeks.

Out of curiosity I looked at the temperature trend of the Baltic Sea, using the NCEP data. The trend is located here . It is for the month of December, which is the most recent available.

It looks like a general cooling since the 1950s, with the coldest years in the early 2000s.
This year (2006) has spiked upwards and is the warmest of the period, but that looks to me like weather, not climate.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece about Carbon Caps. If the Cap Fits.

This is what comes from Washington steadily backstepping energy policy into the interventionist 1970s, picking winners and losers. In ethanol, in biodiesel, in wind farms, success isn’t a function of supply or demand. The champs are the ones that coax out of Washington the best subsidies and regulations. Global warming is simply the biggest trough yet.

re #320
That’s not the point of using snow and ice anomalies. The point is that melting ice is actually being used as “evidence” of global warming, when in fact, it is simply following relatively normal oscillations. I.e. there’s a subtle sarcasm involved when a “denier” posts a link to an ice anomaly.

I wonder what is going on with that graphic. I live in Central Utah and remember December as colder than average. Compare the graphic you posted to this one from the same site: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2006/dec/Last1mTDeptUS.png
On the graphic you posted all four dots that could represent Utah temperatures show above-normal temps, while most of the state, in fact, dealt with below normal temps. So what is going on? My best guess – see that above-normal area in far northern Utah? That includes the Ogden-Salt Lake-Provo metropolis. They are either using Salt Lake as a proxy for the rest of the state, or are simply averaging records from all stations which, like the population, are concentrateed along the northern Wasatch Front.

One other note (just weather) Our town has set 5 new daily low temp. records this winter. Our average daily lows are 13 on Jan 1, and 15 at the end of the month; average daily highs for Jan range from 39 to 43. This year whe have climbed above freezing a grand total of 3 times. It’s just weather, but it is darned cold weather for this area. Municipalities and plumbers are going nuts trying to keep up with all the broken pipes and municipal water lines.

RE: #320 – OK, let me lead you by the nose. The snow coverage pattern in Asia reflects a perisistent dip in the polar jet stream that has been in place since roughly October. It is, in essence, the counterpoint to the persistent dirty ridge which denied Western Europe of moisture during fall and kept temperatures warm there in December and much of January. Meanwhile, due to the Asian dip, not only is snow coverage in Asia excellent, but also, there have been repeated bouts of record cold in all but the immediate Pacific coastal area. So, claimes that “the NH is having a warm winter” are not quite on the up and up. Perhaps, using whatever questionable surface reading avereraging that may be true in a “weighted” sum manner but clearly, the “warm NH” pronouncements are really only true for the Eastern US and Europe, not Asia (nor the Western US).

RE: #317 – I had commented previously both here and at RC that the anomaly had flirted with a zero crossing a number of times. Now it appears that the over trend line of the anomaly is heading for a zero crossing. That is good news for the (not so) widdle polar bears …. and for anyone who likes driving at freeway speed on a frozen ocean … LOL!

A friend of mine mentioned he heard David Suzuki the other day say that there is not a single peer-reviewed paper against GW. I believe I saw here recently a link to a list, but can’t find it – could anyone help? Thank you. (Is DS being clever in saying “GW” when he knows everyone thinks he means “AGW”?)

I noted in another thread a discussion concerning cooling at high Southern latitudes. I have also been following articles in various places on the subject of cosmic rays and their possible impact on climate mainly as to their ability to influence cloud formation and how the magnetic variations of the solar magnetic field might modulate the current of these rays reaching our atmosphere. In an unrelated event, I recently had my children in an area where it was very dark and they (as they generally do when we are away from city lights) wanted me to point out the Milky Way and my daughter noticed that it looked different than in Summer.

As I was explaining that in Winter we see the part of the galaxy that is outward from the center and in Summer we see the part that is toward the center and the Summer view contains more stars, something dawned on me. I explained that in the Winter, the center of the galaxy is behind the sun and we can’t see it.

I came to the conclusion that most cosmic rays reaching earth probably originate from sources in our own galaxy as there are more nearby potential sources for them in that direction. Is it reasonable to assume that the rays reaching earth are greater in quantity in the Norther Hemisphere Summer than in Winter? And if cosmic rays play a role in cloud formation and climate might the impact of these rays reaching their maximum number values in opposite seasons impact climate differently in the two hemispheres? And might the wobble of the earth on its axis cause long term climate changes due to different seasonal timing of the cosmic ray maximum?

I am assuming here that the sun itself would act to shield the earth to some degree from the more densely populated part of the Milky Way when it is opposite the sun from us.

So while solar magnetic field strength might modulate the number of rays reaching earth, the season in which earth receives the largest “dose” of these rays might play a role too. So a decrease or increase in solar magnetic activity might have a much different impact on climate depending on when the orientation of the earth in relation to the Sun and the bulk of the galaxy. A larger number of rays in Winter might have a different climactic impact than a larger number of rays in Summer.

A note for those in North America – the models and mid-range forecasters are indicating a severe cold outbreak the first week of February. Normally these computer-related long range forecasts are to be ignored, due to inaccuracy, but the various models are singing the same tune. When they sing the same tune, it is worth noting.

Perhaps more importantly, the human forecasters, who interpret the models, are beginning to join in. I have access to several non-public forecasting services and they have begun to say “watch out” for early February, which is unusual for them a week in advance.

The target appears to be the central and eastern portions of the continent.

One comparison made today is to the cold outbreaks of the 1980s. One map I saw showed -30C into southern ontario and 0F into Oklahoma-Tennessee.

My experience is that the chances of this happening are maybe 50-50: the NH winter atmosphere is too complex for today’s models to reliably forecast much beyond about 4 or 5 days.

I know this is weather, not climate, but it would be almost surreal to see the IPCC policy-maker headlines alongside the deepfreeze reports.

RE: #336 – Going on a quick getaway trip to the Western Atlantic next week, down in the 20N latitudes. Packing sweaters and rain gear! Good thing it’s next week and not the following week – we’d in all likelihood really be disappointed and wish we’d stayed in NoCal!

#330
Since you don’t like surface temperature measurements, perhaps you’ll like this satellite based map of December’s anomalies. This map uses 2000-2005 as the normal period, a much warmer period that 1960-90 often used. This evidence is easier to audit than your intuition about snow cover.

#317/332
If you look at this figure you will see that there has been no trend in winter ice cover in the Arctic, so having no anomaly in winter is not very exciting. It’s fairly easy to freeze large areas in winter, and the hibernating polar bears don’t care. The trend in summer ice cover much more interesting.

I entered a post into the queue early yesterday with the simple words “Dr. Bitz, No comment on #99?” and they blocked it. They are overtly preventing certain more challenging questions from being seen by the good doctor. Pathetic!

In the interest of fostering better communication, could you please help me and others here understand the meanings of the words you use in your postings? To begin, in this comment you state:

Bill F (posting 23): Can you and others please stop harrassing anyone they find called “Jim Barrett” and who you think could be me? I use a pseudonym and will continue to do so while this is the generally-accepted norm on climateaudit, and particularly while the person who originally suggested this site to Steve McIntyre and who manages this site insists in anonymity.

My confusion lies in my understanding of the word ‘harrassing’ and how you are using it. Let me cite two examples, the first being when a commenter speculates upon the identity of another commenter, based upon internet searching that suggests similar themes in published and publicly available information (for reference see here). The second instance is when a commenter using the same nym (pseudo or otherwise) as you posts a comment with four email addresses with various permutations of another poster’s name (specifically mine, see .) The obvious consequence of which is to expose those addresses to harvesting by spammers. That reckless posting exposed not only my email address but that of at least one other person as well. So tell me, if you would be so kind, which of these two actions constitutes ‘harassing’ activity?

In a more recent thread you go to great lengths to support the correctness of your arguments, based on your unique meanings of such words as ‘trend’, ‘model’, and ‘linear.’

To minimize the churlish cross-postings, how about if you share with us the meanings of these words according to the anomnymous entity calling itself Jim Barrett? It would go a long way in helping anyone reading your posts to understand your special perspective.

UC, clearly you don’t understand climate science. These are special dots, and their size represents how hot or cold the station was. But when it’s really, really cold, the inexorable forces of nature take over. At that point the dots, due to thermodynamics, shrink just like any other material exposed to cold temperatures. At times, they shrink until you can’t even see them. Likewise, when they’re really hot, they expand a little. Like the AGW supporters say, “it’s simple physics” … you wouldn’t want their model not to follow first principles, would you?

Seriously? It’s just typical GIGO computer output, combined with a grievous lack of quality control and a predisposition to like maps with lots of big red dots …

In our collaboration we have a very formal internal review process for getting out results. We need to document everything in advance of two presentations to the appropriate physics analysis meeting. The first presentation is called a “pre-blessing” and is where the real knives come out. The presenter is peppered with deep, probing questions about every aspect of the analysis, usually for an hour or more. Though it can seem like a blood sport at times, this is an absolutely essential part of the scientific process: if we aren’t our own worst skeptics then someone else will do it for us.

“An energy-balance model of global climate, which takes into account a nontrivial role of galactic cosmic rays, is developed. The model is described by the fold catastrophe equation relative to increment of temperature, where galactic cosmic rays and insolation are control parameters. The comparison of the results of a computer simulation of time-dependent solution of the presented model and oxygen isotope records of deep-sea core V28-238 over the past 730 kyr are presented. The climate evolution in future 100 kyr is also predicted.”

True, but this is the nature of complex predictions. Given that the total GHG forcing predicted by Hansen in scenario B is quite accurate, I don’t see what the problem is.

Again I am not sure I am understanding what you are saying as Hansen was attempting to show the capabilities of computer models in predicting temperature changes. The models do not predict GHGs and their forcings. Actually the GHG forcings were not all that accurate as you can see by looking at the Figure 1 in the link below which shows that the GHG forcings growth rates have decreased dramatically from the time of Hansen’s scenario constructions in 1988 through the final year of graph for the year 2000.

You know what? The wonder of this site is that all of the posters, except a few trolls, are interested in LEARNING, not just arguing. I find that exciting and rewarding. I have learned a great deal and really appreciate this site. I have looked at countless blogs and have not found one that approaches this one for fairness, honesty, and integrity. Thanks Steve M. and all the real contributers here.

True, but this is the nature of complex predictions. Given that the total GHG forcing predicted by Hansen in scenario B is quite accurate, I don’t see what the problem is.

This is why discussing things with you is so frustrating. You pontificate about things you haven’t researched. Do you truly think we haven’t investigated this closely? Here’s Hansen’s own comparison of the total GHG forcing (6 gases) with the forcing predicted by the scenarios.

As you can see, your claim is nonsense. The actual GHG forcing ran well below Scenario B, and has continued to do so since Hansen produced this graph (1995), with the gap widening every year. All you are showing us is that you haven’t done your homework.

In any case, given that the total GHG forcing predicted by Hansen in scenario B is quite inaccurate, do you now see what the problem is?

#347: I notice that arxiv has rather lenient requirements for posting, and that the cited paper has not been cited by anyone else. Hmm… I wonder why? Could it be that the first sentence, although highly debatable is presented as certainty? Could it be that Svensmark is a “questionable authority”?

#348: It seems to me as though scenairo B (a bit high on CO2 a bit low on CH4) is probably the best match to total GHG forcing (see http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/39/14288). In spite of what Willis says, these results seem pretty convincing to me — the models do have a modicum of skill and have for quite some time. Yes the 1988 model got some things wrong (in particular warming in the southern ocean), but a ton of progress has been made in the last 18 years, and indeed esitmates of S (climate sensitivity to 2x CO2) have come down quite a bit. Are they correct? We really can’t say; we also can’t say much about the correctness of GISS Model II because the time involved is too short. Hansen makes this abundantly in his paper, so I don’t see what everyone’s fuss is about.

#347 & 348: I really am interested in learning, but I don’t find much of that on this site. Most of the posters, including Steve M, seem to have preconceived notions of what is correct. Willis, Ken, Lubos, Steve S, Spence, Freddy, Rocks, John A — all of the regulars here do not want to admit that AGW might be correct for explicityly political reasons; exactly the same sort of motives which they accuse the climate science community of having.

Yes, Steve found a single methodological mistake (I leave the BCP issue to the side, since the 1999 paper acknowledged it and attempted to correct for it). Mann & Co. have also shown that it didn’t really make any difference in the end. Even Steve M has tacitly admitted that in some of his graphs although he keeps fighting for his point, after all this has elevated him from an obscure mining executive to an eminence in the AGW skeptic commuity. Who wouldn’t be happy with the adulations? This is a very human trait, I am not accusing Steve M of having some perfidious ulterior motive, however there is some limit at which knowledge of statistics without a sound knowledge of the underlying science can take you. I think that Steve and most of the “scientific” posters here have reached that limit.

Many of the posts here relate to annual and decadal temperature changes or anomalies. This is not the only way to pose questions about present and future climate. Quaternary studies generally place modern climate conditions in the context of a planet that has been cooling for millions of years.

From that perspective, we are enjoying a brief warm period that has already lasted as long as a typical interglacial of the past. The link below is to graphs of Antarctic temperature showing that previous interglacials were usually warmer than the present interglacial has ever been.

Note: In one of the graphs shown, the 5 million-year graph, the benthic carbonate scale is roughly equivalent to an inverted temperature scale.

The graphs suggest two possibilities:

The first is that this interglacial is coming to an end and that we may soon expect another 100,000 years or so of ice. Soon in this context might mean 100 years or 1,000 years.

Alternatively, based on maximum temperatures during previous interglacials, we are due for an increase in temperature two or three degrees Celsius higher than during the mid-Holocene climate optimum, about 5,000 years ago. This rise in temperature would come before another ice age.

From this perspective, we would derive different policies than from human-induced global warming. We would spend money on mitigating air and water pollution, soil degradation and erosion, together with other environmental initiatives. But we would not be concerned about gases, except as pollutants.

We would spend money to mitigate the effects of sea-level rise, floods, drought, desertification and other threats to land use. But we would not labour under the misapprehension that we could prevent climatic change from taking place.

Efforts and money spent to prevent climate change will not be available to mitigate the effects of climate change. If the scientists get it wrong, we all pay for nothing.
Trillions of dollars are at stake. Scientist must meet the same or higher standard than the FDA requires for approval of a new drug.

So it is no good saying:
* I lost the data
* Your critique is too complicated for our readers
* The computer code I used is secret

Non-scientists are paying the bill. They have the right to demand that scientists keep proper records of the data and demonstrate transparency in their analysis.

all of the regulars here do not want to admit that AGW might be correct for explicityly political reasons;

Actually, the stated positions of everyone you mention is that it MAY be correct, but buried beneath all the lies and hype, we’re unwilling to simply hop on the bandwagon without a demonstration that the hypothesis works without some strange contrivation of the data.

Non-scientists are paying the bill. They have the right to demand that scientists keep proper records of the data and demonstrate transparency in their analysis.

Someone mentioned in another thread something about “why is this always about the way businesses do this, there are other ways”… probably Bloom/Barrett/ or someone. The reason business examples are brought up so regularly is simple: they’re set the way they are to remove the implication of impropriety, bias, agenda, etc. Science is ALL about transparency. Any “scientist” that attempts to hide his data/results is doing so to prevent outside audit. Business works the way it does to hopefully prevent this (and even then, it is fallable). Removing such restrictions from publicly funded science opens the door to an already easy system to cheat. Duh…

I posted #347 in response to a specific query. The paper is one of the few papers on the arvix site that does not have a citation, so I assume it is not from a journal.

For someone who is not an astro-physicist, the paper is refreshing just because it is so far out. (Sorry about the pun).

JMS:

I also get the sense that many poster deny that climate change is occurring. I do not take this position. I don’t think it matters if the last decade was the warmest in 400 years because such a rise could still represent a natural increase at the tail end of the little ice age.

What matters is whether or not the temperature rise is man-made. For if it is not man-made, then we ought to find ways to cope with change and not waste effort trying to stop change.

I was skeptical in 2000 before I did an M.S. degree in Earth science, and I am still skeptical. I believed in 2000 that the observed climate change is due to natural causes and I have not been able to convince myself otherwise.

It’s not the first time that I have held a minority view. When I was an undergraduate over 50 years ago, I believed that South America and Africa were once joined, having separated millions of years ago. My professor told me that I must not reveal such a belief because no academic who believed in “continental drift” could get tenure in North American. What I see now is the same sort of consensus forming concerning AGW.

I hold a minority view “NGW” natural global warming. I don’t know what the forcing mechanism is any more than I knew what the forcing mechanism was for continental drift.

What I suspect is that people wish so hard to see mankind at the center of the universe, that they prefer even a malevolent role to no role at all. I think that is the main basis for the emerging consensus: philosophy and psychology and not science.

Kerry Emanuel has an interesting and pleasantly readable article which attempts to make sense of the whole climate debate. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but it does offer much to think about.

JMS, you are full of #%$!. If you believe that everybody who votes left of center, finds the AGW hypothosis solid science, you are greatly misguided and/or don’t get out much. Same goes for the opposite. BTW what I find more alarming above any doom and gloom senerio about the climate is that the people who seem to be the authoriy or are “in charge” of this AGW issue, or just believe it (and construct overviews of the situation such as yours here) are such petty and narrow minded-labelers-and they are so judgemental! Dare I say, bigoted as I have ever seen in my lifetime. They like to put people into groups or divide them into catagories. They also practice censorship. Do you think I want anybody like that, whether scientist, political leader or plain old voter, guiding my state or country or planet into the future? NO I do not.

Plotting the global mean temperature derived from actual measurements and from proxies going back a thousand years or more reveals that the recent upturn in global temperature is truly unprecedented: the graph of temperature with time shows a characteristic hockey-stick shape, with the business end of the stick representing the upswing of the last 50 years or so.

I wish I could reproduce the hockey stick

Computer modeling of global climate is perhaps the most complex endeavor ever undertaken by mankind.

Not even close. Or maybe I misunderstood the sentence.

This exercise has been repeated using many different climate models, with the same qualitative result: one cannot simulate the evolution of the climate over last 30 years without including in the simulations mankind’s influence on sulfate aerosols and greenhouse gases. This, in a nutshell, is why almost all climate scientists today believe that man’s influence on climate has emerged from the background noise of natural variability.

I can simulate the evolution of the climate over last 150 years just by using AR1 p=0.93 process. Including more regressor variables makes the fit better, spurious correlation or not.

Were the entire Greenland ice cap to melt, sea level would increase by around 22 feet”¢’¬?flooding many coastal regions including much of southern Florida and lower Manhattan.

+ 3 degrees from now for 2000 years, would Greenland ice cap melt then?

In the first category are findings that are not in dispute, not even by les refusards
The year 2005 was the warmest in the instrumental record.

RE #363 Likewise, I find Emanuel’s article interesting and worth a read by people of all persuasions. It may even be worth its own thread here at CA.

There’s something in it for everyone. For example,

Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.

I would have used the word ideology rather than politics, but the point stands.

Another paragraph is

many of the critical uncertainties about climate change are slowly being whittled down. The extremists are being exposed and relegated to the sidelines, and when the media stop amplifying their views, their political counterparts will have nothing left to stand on.

I think he misses a key consideration. As the conversation grows, it includes increasing numbers of technically-trained people. Some of these are visible at CA and include mathematicians, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists, medical professionals and so forth.

While we lack knowledge of some specifics, we are not stupid people. We learn, we question, as we would learn and question any topic. We are not going to accept things based on “trust me”: any persuasion will need to be based on “show me”, especially on the extraordinary claims. We are not impressed by scareplots, including Emanuel’s famous pin-the-end plot.

To the chagrin of some, technically-oriented people tend to be influential in their own small parts of the world. This influence extends beyond other technical people to include parts of the general public. It spreads not so much via the internet but rather by the coffee (tea) pot. In our way, we’re a factor in the public debate.

Don’t dismiss the mathematicians, geologists, engineers and so forth as extremists but rather work to convince us, using science that stands up to intense auditing, as other fields of science use and do.

Even the monthly Hadley CRUT3 plot is looking rather unenergetic in recent years, with a generally-sideways movement over the last 5 years.

The uptick for December was driven in part by the moderate El Nino. That El Nino has faded as fast as any I recall, with evidence of subsurface tropical cooling. That, combined with the cool-phase Pacific (PDO) may lead to a no-record 2007.

This link (in Table 2 — as noted #348) shows the GHG forcings from 1979 through 2005. The year 1990 is indexed to 1.00 and the increase from that time to 2005 is shown to be 21.5%. Going back to Willis E’s graph (in comment #351 for forcings through 1998) and using my link to project from 1990 to 2005 would put the actual GHG increase at something close to 1.22 on the Willis E graph for 2005. The actual value for 2005 then is actually below the level predicted for Scenario C for 2005.

I’ve chided others for pseudo-swearing and I will do the same for you. Please, there is no need for it here. If you feel very emotional about a post it always helps to take a little time to cool down before replying.

JMS, I find it astonishing that people think that I and many of the other posters take our positions for political reasons, viz:

Willis, Ken, Lubos, Steve S, Spence, Freddy, Rocks, John A “¢’¬? all of the regulars here do not want to admit that AGW might be correct for explicityly political reasons

First, taking the step from a person’s stated position to the reason they hold that position is one that I would be very unwilling to take without knowing much more about the person than is visible on this blog. Your statement about “all the regulars” is ridiculous on its face, the motives of the regulars are unknown. It is worth noting that someone who believes they know the regular’s motives is a perfect patsy for AGW propaganda, they’ll obviously believe anything.

Second, the statement is very poorly phrased, as if AGW were an “either-or” proposition. Most people, myself included, think human activities have had some effect on the climate. The real questions are how much effect, and how? My own research has led me to the conclusion that the main forces driving climate changes are 1) Solar; 2) Natural oscillations and multi-stable shifts; 3) Land-use changes; 4, or maybe 5 or 6) GHG changes. So am I saying that AGW is “correct” or not?

Third, my politics are left, very left. One of the world’s tragedies to me is that the left has unthinkingly swallowed the AGW party line.

Finally, in the absence of other information, it is both very discourteous and extremely foolish to ascribe the worst of motives to someone’s actions. A better assumption is that they are basing their claims on scientific facts … who knows, you might actually learn something that way, and if you are wrong about their motives, nothing is lost. Plus, if they are wrong, you can advance their understanding by showing where their science is misunderstood.

#364: Rocks, although you may claim to be left of center your posts certainly do not belie that view. While I am sure that your husband is a nice man, your appeal to authority (he does after all have an MS in Environmental Geology) become boring after a while. When looked at in terms of geological time the recent changes are small, and your husband is correct about that, but when viewed in terms of the last 10,000 years or so — the time in which humans developed agriculture and civilization — they are large. I am not sure that I am willing to risk civilization on a bet. Even Darwin, writing in 1859, realized the effects of climate on the differential survival of species. Do you really want to bet the survival of our species, at least in our present numbers, on a belief which is somewhat less than a hunch?

#366: David, why should we trust the views of people who don’t study the climate sytem for a living (or at least at a starving post-doc level)? There are at least a few scientists, only one or two of whom have studied biology, which hold that the theory of evolution — the basis for an entire branch of science — is wrong. Should we listen to them just because they are scientists, even though they don’t know what they are talking about? It strikes me that listening to engineers (especially, they are the most silly proponets of non-evolutionary explanations of the diversity of life), mathemeticians, statistics geeks, people who don’t know a damn about climate or weather modelling, &c &c, people who refuse to look at the evidence, &c, &c, as authorities on the climate system? The basics of the system are pretty well established; yes there are still a ton of questions which are still unanswered, that is the basic nature of science. You can’t, as so many here want to do, invoke he “god of the gaps” argument. Just because we don’t know everything does not mean that we know nothing.

#371: Willis, I wonder why you rank things in that order. For example if solar/GCR is the main driver of the warming in the last 50 years explain how a .16 W/m^2 (or so) change in TSI has produced a .6 (or a revised number of .8) degree C increase in termperature. The change in forcing just isn’t enough to produce this. If it is GCR please cite a mechanism, Svensmark et. al. (2006) isn’t good enough. Everyone admits that GCRs do produce CCN, there is just no proof that the effect is as strong as the Svensmark study postulated.

Second, although natural oscillations do exist, they are mostly drive by orbital variations which are predictable. Unless there is an unkown oscillation at work, there is not really any evidence that orbital changes have had much effect in the last few thousand years. The recent history of the climate, excluding the recent warming, is a story of stability. I might also ask what is a multi-stable shift? A D-O event?

Third, although land use changes undoubtably do lead to shifts in climate, the vast majority of land use changes involve a conversion of forested land to cropland. This actually involves an increase in planetary albedo, which should lead to a cooling effect. Or are cows farting CH4 formed from C in this years grass crop (a basically carbon neutral process) part of the land use change?

Finally we come to GHG forcings. The historical record shows that the history of of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere during the Holocene is a story of stability, with level varying from 270 to 300 ppmv (more or less) over the course of the last 12000 years. We have gone from 280 ppmv at the beginning of the 19th century to a bit over 380 ppmv in 2006. This corresponds to a period in which we went through the industrial revolution and greatly increased our use of carbon which has basically been sequestered since the Carboninferous period 300,000,000 yBP. Is this really a coincidence?

As to whether you are saying that AGW theory is correct or not, I would tend to think that you are saying that the anthropogenic increase in GHG forcing is of limited impact. As Steve B. has noted on another blog you have pretty much denied and tried to find fault with every piece of climate science, no matter how well established. Well, I guess that you haven’t gone after Tyndall and Fourier yet, even though you have attacked Arrhenius (or was that Hans? Sorry if I messed up). Given your record of posting here and on other sites I would say that, yes, you do deny that AGW theory is correct.

Finally, I do not understand why one would think that politics are the worst of all possible motives. Your political beliefs are the result of the interaction of your world view and your experiences in the real world. There is nothing wrong with this, but one should not cloak political views with the veil of science, especially if you do not make a living studying a particular branch of science. On this I think that we can both agree. However scientists like Hansen have spent the better part of a lifetime studying the climate system and are more entitiled to their views than you and I. This might seem like an appeal to authority, but I look at an appeal to (and I think most logicians would agree) authority as saying that Inhofe said something &c, &c (I’ve been reading Darwin lately and he uses that a lot, a Victorian thing I am sure.)

Finally, I gather that you are an American, or that you at least spend a substantial amount of time in HI. I don’t know if you realize this but US politics has moved so far to the right that Bill Clinton (a center right politician in old fashioned US terms, or rightist in international tems) was characterized as far left, as is his center right wife. So, I don’t know what far left means to you, but I call ’em as I seem ’em and I would classify you as center right, based on your posts. Now on to the next victim.

Finally…

361: I tend to agree with your coment, what ever the cause of the warming (and boy has it been warm here in southwest MT, this is the third year in a row where I haven’t had to put on my snow tires!) we need to adapt to it. If it is caused by the, pretty much inarguable, increase in GHG forcing then we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Even though I am a greenie, and opposed nukes in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I now realize that I was wrong. But reducing GHG pollution, which will also result in the decrease in of other pollutants as well, is a sort of “no regrest” policy. We are eventually going to have to transition off of fossil fuels — why not start now?

And in the end, although man likes — even must — see himself as the center of the universe, sometimes he does have a substantial effect of his environment. We have been modifying our environment to our uses since the beginning of agriculture, about 10,000 years (probably more) ago. Cahnges in the Levant region, the massive deforestation, have been ascribed to mankind. We are not without effect on the face of the earth. There are now 6,500,000,000 or so of us. Do you really think that a species with a population of a few million (maybe even a few hundred thousand) which could affect the environment of the region out of which it came would not be able to affect the environment when the population of that species had increased by 3 orders of magnitude with a concominant increase (perhaps even greater) in it’s technological prowess? I think that is a rather foolish point of view to hold, given the history of our species to modify, often unintentionally, the environment on a local scale. Whay could we not unintentionally modify the global environment?

Yours in hoping that the Internationl Framework on Climate Change actually does some good,

#371: Willis, I wonder why you rank things in that order. For example if solar/GCR is the main driver of the warming in the last 50 years explain how a .16 W/m^2 (or so) change in TSI has produced a .6 (or a revised number of .8) degree C increase in termperature. The change in forcing just isn’t enough to produce this. If it is GCR please cite a mechanism, Svensmark et. al. (2006) isn’t good enough. Everyone admits that GCRs do produce CCN, there is just no proof that the effect is as strong as the Svensmark study postulated.

Please read my post. I was discussing the main drivers of the climate. If you have a better explanation for the Little Ice Age, bring it on. Until then, I think changes in solar magnetism and TSI have the strongest scientific support as an explanation. While the exact mechanisms are not yet clear, the correspondence between solar magnetic strength and climate is abundantly supported. Were solar changes responsible for the 20th century temperature change? For the first half of the century, even the UN IPCC says it was the main driver. For the recent part, the jury’s still out … but I doubt that the effect of the sun suddenly disappeared.

Second, although natural oscillations do exist, they are mostly drive by orbital variations which are predictable. Unless there is an unkown oscillation at work, there is not really any evidence that orbital changes have had much effect in the last few thousand years. The recent history of the climate, excluding the recent warming, is a story of stability. I might also ask what is a multi-stable shift? A D-O event?

Sorry for the lack of clarity. Natural oscillations are things like the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Arctic Oscillation, and the like. With your knowledge of climate science, I assumed that the word “Oscillation” in the names that climate scientists have given to these phenomena might have given you a clue. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the El Nino are more in the nature of a shift between quasi-stable states, as are the ice ages.

As to the rest, you’ll have to define “recent” and “stability” before I can comment on your statement that “The recent history of the climate, excluding the recent warming, is a story of stability.” Most proxies show that it has been both warmer and colder than at present in the last 1,000 years, and significantly warmer in the last 10,000 years. Is that “stable” or “recent”, or both or neither?

Third, although land use changes undoubtably do lead to shifts in climate, the vast majority of land use changes involve a conversion of forested land to cropland. This actually involves an increase in planetary albedo, which should lead to a cooling effect. Or are cows farting CH4 formed from C in this years grass crop (a basically carbon neutral process) part of the land use change?

If you truly think that cutting down a forest makes the local area cooler, you definitely should be reading more and posting less. Even NOAA says that land use changes may have warmed the earth more than CO2. You could start your reading here.

Finally we come to GHG forcings. The historical record shows that the history of of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere during the Holocene is a story of stability, with level varying from 270 to 300 ppmv (more or less) over the course of the last 12000 years. We have gone from 280 ppmv at the beginning of the 19th century to a bit over 380 ppmv in 2006. This corresponds to a period in which we went through the industrial revolution and greatly increased our use of carbon which has basically been sequestered since the Carboninferous period 300,000,000 yBP. Is this really a coincidence?

We are in agreement that the recent rise in CO2 has a major anthropogenic component. What we disagree on is whether a change in airborne CO2 from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.04% of the atmosphere has had large temperature consequences.

As to whether you are saying that AGW theory is correct or not, I would tend to think that you are saying that the anthropogenic increase in GHG forcing is of limited impact. As Steve B. has noted on another blog you have pretty much denied and tried to find fault with every piece of climate science, no matter how well established. Well, I guess that you haven’t gone after Tyndall and Fourier yet, even though you have attacked Arrhenius (or was that Hans? Sorry if I messed up). Given your record of posting here and on other sites I would say that, yes, you do deny that AGW theory is correct.

Quoting Steve Bloom on this blog won’t get you any traction at all, we all know his credibility. I have attacked what seems like bad science to me. Unfortunately, a good chunk of climate “science” falls in that category. The field is has far too many “scientists” who hide their data, conceal their methods, make up “novel” analytic schemes to further their agenda, and exaggerate their results.

If you disagree with the results of my research, I am more than happy to discuss that. I have been wrong before, and will be again, and I have no problem admitting it when it happens. That is the nature of science, I put out what I think is correct, and other people try to find fault with it. If they can, it falls, and if they can’t, it stands.

You, on the other hand, seem to think that attacking people’s motives and politics, using Steve Bloom as your citation, is how science progresses. You could not be more wrong.

Finally, I do not understand why one would think that politics are the worst of all possible motives. Your political beliefs are the result of the interaction of your world view and your experiences in the real world. There is nothing wrong with this, but one should not cloak political views with the veil of science, especially if you do not make a living studying a particular branch of science. On this I think that we can both agree.

I did not say that “politics are the worst of all possible motives”, that’s your fantasy. I said “Finally, in the absence of other information, it is both very discourteous and extremely foolish to ascribe the worst of motives to someone’s actions.” This means that assuming someone is acting from bad motives rather than sincere belief is not a brilliant plan. You should try doing the opposite sometime.

However scientists like Hansen have spent the better part of a lifetime studying the climate system and are more entitiled to their views than you and I. This might seem like an appeal to authority, but I look at an appeal to (and I think most logicians would agree) authority as saying that Inhofe said something &c, &c (I’ve been reading Darwin lately and he uses that a lot, a Victorian thing I am sure.)

I think you have a naive view of scientists. They are human like the rest of us, they make mistakes, stick to wrong positions for reasons of pride, have pet theories that they refuse to examine critically, blindly believe things that are not true, and sometimes even lie, conceal, obfuscate, and simply make stuff up. Nor does studying a subject for a lifetime mean that someone is right. This is particularly true in the highly politicized, grant-driven field of climate science. You are free to always believe Hansen over anyone, from Richard Lindzen to Steve McIntyre, if you wish. Me, I know I’m not smart enough to make that decision based simply on their notoriety and length of study, so instead, I look at the underlying science and mathematics. When one or the other is right, the science and math will show that, and the same is true if both are wrong.

Finally, I gather that you are an American, or that you at least spend a substantial amount of time in HI. I don’t know if you realize this but US politics has moved so far to the right that Bill Clinton (a center right politician in old fashioned US terms, or rightist in international tems) was characterized as far left, as is his center right wife. So, I don’t know what far left means to you, but I call “em as I seem “em and I would classify you as center right, based on your posts.

Your view of American politics is as strange as your view of science. Here’s the four-one-one, as we say in America. (The phone number for directory assistance in the US is 411.)

Democrats are on the left. Republicans are on the right. Bill and Hillary are both on the left, and are generally thought of as center left. I’ve never heard either one referred to as “far left.” Jesse Jackson is far left. Center right Republicans are kinda scarce these days, maybe John McCain. Bush and Cheney are far right.

You know little of American politics, and absolutely nothing about my politics, and it is stupid in the extreme to claim you do. Do I believe in gun control? In abortion? In “states rights”? In progressive taxation? In an “interpretive” versus a “strict constructionist” judiciary? In amnesty for illegal immigrants? In income redistribution for social welfare? You don’t have a clue, and yet you prattle on about not only my politics, but the politics of all of the “regulars” who post here … pathetic.

More to the point, you don’t seem to understand that politics and climate science are different subjects, and that there are people from both the right and left who disagree with the “CO2 is the greatest threat to mankind” hypothesis. Forget about the politics and the motives, they are immaterial to the truth content of someone’s position on a particular scientific question. Science is not interested in “right or left”, it is interested in “right or wrong”.

Now on to the next victim.

This final short sentence, only six words, manages to be simultaneously asinine, patronizing, supercilious, juvenile, and blatantly wrong. I think you may have set a blog record.

I should do as bender does and start a list, but this time of names and insults made toward geologists these days by climate alarmists. (Got to get rid of the MWP don’t you know) Now JMS claims that my husband, the geologist is correct but that’s boring! Does the need for drama over-rule all reason these days?
#369, Earle
sorry about that, and I understand what you mean, however I am a big girl, so saying ” full of crap ” or “full of bologna” just would not cut it LOL. See also #358. And I wasn’t full of anger, honestly. Most of the time I laugh and shake my head-or just get disgusted at the rudeness-really-more than anything. Cheers! 🙂

With regard to proxies, forcer’s and model identifications I think the correct way to model the earth is as a low pas filter. This means if the solar input has a well defined spectral peak, that peak should still be apparent on earth but it could be phase delayed. Knowing the spectral width and the peak frequency the solar input can be modeled as a forced damped harmonic oscillator. A forced damped harmonic oscillator has the state space equation:

rho is chosen based on the spectral width and wo is chosen based on the peak frequency. One can then find the states x1 and x2 using some estimation technique (e.g. A kalman filter). Once the states are identified if each state is used as a proxy, then the using the linear combination of the two proxies you can get the desired phase relationships.

Climate science is a very young discipline making extraordinary claims about a socially-important subject. As such, it should expect to be scrutinized by people from other science-oriented disciplines and it should welcome that scrutiny, not shrink from it or demean it.

There are ideologues on the skeptical side just as there are ideologues on the true-believer side. My point is that, in addition to ideologues, there are now science-oriented people who are also asking questions, who may be ignorant of climate science details but are not stupid and can (and do) learn. We practice much of the same tough-love within our own professions, much tougher in fact than what I’ve seen within climate science.

These fellow science-oriented professionals have influence and it would benefit the climate science community to answer the questions, raise the standards and turn this group into allies, not by scareplots, exaggerations and hand-waving but by detailed reasoning and auditing of the same type we practice in our own professions.

On the thread “Fixing the Facts to the Policy Thread”, the questions/concerns I put to Gary Strand about computer modeling, alas, went unanswered either directly by Gary or the links he provided. Unfortunately, instead I got a lot of discussion of and generalizations about the postings and the posters at CA. I have recently made the same observation/complaint about Jim Barret. Evidence is mounting that one can determine rather quickly whether those that post primarily with an adversarial point of view (APOV) can add enlightenment and any new information or views on material subjects presented here for analyses once they get by the seemingly obligatory complaint about their treatment at CA and negative assessments of posters here.

Now we all make generalizations and personal comments that do not necessarily add to the topical discussion or much to the general enlightenment. Often these comments are made without a reply or further comment — and that is good. The problem of wasted space comes when these comments draw multiple responses and we get distracted from the discussion at hand. These comments often involve an APOV and usually when generalized observations are made. I think that we all need to do our parts better to keep these discussions on target and on topic.

If I wanted to degenerate the discussions at this site, I would do exactly what some who come on here do and exhibit what might be labeled trollish (I think for the most part incorrectly) behavior and hope for the responses that they too frequently receive. That is, however, only the end result and not what I judge those coming here intend. I think they come to discuss the issues but certainly with some negative edginess about what goes on here. Some of them seem to have or develop an overwhelming desire to let most of the posters here know what a rather low opinion they have of them and that is when the problems of wasted space begin.

I think if most of us remember that we know these people probably have low opinions of us when taken in total (at least, vis a vis climate science) we can avoid much of the wasted off topic discussions. We can learn from some of these APOVs by what they contribute, and, for that matter and perhaps more often, by what they do not contribute, even when they have low opinions of us. I think that is the value of Steve M running a more open forum.

Steve M has provided a number of interesting topics to discuss and has gotten this retired guy interested in subjects that I now find fascinating. I would, for selfish reasons and efficiency, rather read and post on those topics than spend so much time on the off, and near off, topic APOV exchanges.

Re # 378 Ken, you may have to help me on this, as I haven’t closely read all the Hansen discussion (you, willis and others are to be admired for the patience you’ve shown through it all).

What I read in the chart is that GHG has grown noticeably slower than forecast in earlier years, with CH4 leveled off. The slowing has been such that we’re below Scenario C, which was a very optimistic (at the time) scenario.
Am I missing another aspect?

“Laisser celui qui est sans péché, lancer la premiàÆà⧲e pierre”.
Re#373 WOW!
I was at a friends place(Al Gore believers)last night and introduced them to this site.Their comments? What an eye opener!They were in a state of shock when I left.
Thank you all keep up the good work.
Back the action.

Headline: “Steve Connor: Global warming is not some conspiratorial hoax”

Some extracts, representing a forerunner of AR4:
“It is clear from the draft version of the report that there is now overwhelming evidence to link man-made emissions of greenhouse gases over the past 250 years to dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate.”

“With the climate science community, the IPCC has a reputation of being conservative and erring on the side of caution.”
“… one of the great unspoken fears of climate change – that it may be far worse than anyone can predict”.

“We are due to see temperature rises of about 3C this century, but the IPCC also says that it cannot rule out a rise of 6C or more.” (I would round it up to an even 10C, much neater.)

“The IPCC recognises that there are many “positive feedbacks” in the climate system – more apparently than the negative feedbacks that tend to modulate climate change – which could make matters worse as levels of carbon dioxide and global temperatures continue to rise”

I like this bit: “Some of these feedbacks are pretty well understood, but many are not. And there may even be some that we don’t even know about. This is one of the reasons why there are still many levels of uncertainty when it comes to the future. ” Thus, the greater the uncertainty, the more we have to fear. Its the unkown unkowns that could get us in the end!

“But whatever the uncertainties, one thing is clear. We are changing the face of the planet and we have a limited period of time in which to do something about it.”

Multiple Lines of Evidence: The Scientific Case for Global Warming and its Causation

What is the scientific case for global warming and its causation? Is the scientific case for global warming built upon multiple lines of internally consistent evidence, or is the evidence thin and contradictory? How significant is the role of humans in global warming and what is the evidentiary basis for this claim?

Earth’s climate exhibits variations on all resolvable timescales, from the interannual (year to year) to the geological (millions of years and longer). This variability is known to result from both internal and external (including humann or “anthropogenic’) factors. Over the past two millennia, the basic boundary conditions of Earth’s climate (e.g., the continental arrangement, orography, Earth-orbital parameters, and the spatial extent of continental ice sheets) have not changed significantly. This time interval thus provides an appropriate context for estimating the envelope of natural climate variability within which modern climate change should be interpreted. Because the instrumental record can only provide information regarding large-scale (e.g., hemispheric) climate changes over only the past one-and-a-half centuries, and selected regions for only the past few centuries, it is essential that we turn to other lines of evidence to evaluate the longer-term changes over the past one or two millennia.

One line of evidence is provided by so-called proxy climate data, natural or historical archives of information that describe, albeit imperfectly, climate variations in prior centuries. Those proxy data with relatively high (decadal or better) resolution, such as tree rings, corals, ice cores, historical records, and in some cases speleothems, and lake and marine sediments can be used to reconstruct climate variations over past centuries and, in some cases, as far back as the past two millennia. At hemispheric scales, the warmth of recent decades appears unprecedented in the context of at least the past 1000 years, and probably longer.

It is also possible to estimate from proxy and historical sources the external “forcings” of climate in past centuries (specifically, volcanic and solar natural radiative forcing, and anthropogenic greenhouse gas, aerosol, and land-use changes). These estimates can be used to drive theoretical climate model simulations. A comparison of proxy-based reconstructions with model simulation affirm the role of natural (solar and volcanic) radiative forcing changes in climate changes over past centuries. However, the anomalous warmth of recent decades can only be explained by modern anthropogenic forcing.

…

This seminar series is open to the public and does not require a reservation.
You are invited to forward this notice to friends and colleagues

several quick points –
One, it appears I misremembered the (lack of) CIs in Hansen’s paper – my apologies. However, his clear reference to statistical comparison of the trends shows that he is considering the issue of error.

Wilis, you use 1958 on, but THAT IS NOT THE ENTIRE OUTPUT. Each year adds another year to the trace, and each year therefore yields a different trend. You imply you aren’t using just a portion, but you are – and different portins yield different slopes for the trend. That means that the trend you fit is not THE trend, it is a fit trend for that portin fo the output, and since it changes with different parts of the output, it has an error.

You are being diusingeniousl when you dismiss the spoolup with – it doesn’t matter if its 50 or 100 or 500 years. I never argued that the specific length was the issue. What is the issue is that Hansen ran the model for 50 years under 1958 conditions for calibration purposes, and then used those 50 years – this is arbitrary, and the specific value does not matter – of 1958 conditions to get a good mean climate value for 1958, and then aligned to that mean. By using only the the last of those 50 years, you throw away 98% of the alignment data, and you introduce to the entire subsequent record an offset equal in magnitude to the annual variation from mean in that last year. This has now been pointed out many times, and you have not responded on point to it. In fact, you repeat the cl,aim above, without even alluding to any issue over the alignment.

Now, I’ve said this before – I come to CA to be challenged on what I think I know – I’m damn sure not expecting to change anyone’s mind here. I have changed my mind on some issues here, and I look for intelligent and supported challenges on others. And there are still some people herre who appear to be making clear and solid arguments worth listening to. But when I find someone who makes what appear to me to be substantial and repeated errors, and the best I get when I challenge back on them is effectively ‘you’re an idiot’ in the process of repeatedly avoiding the point I’m making, it becomes clear that I’m dealing with a propagandist, rather than someone interested in intellectual exploration.

The man who brought us “No Child Left Behind”, and the biggest increase in Medicare in decades is far right? I don’t think so.

Yeah, he actually falls into the moderate right category (w.r.t. US politics) in most “charts.”

I suppose it is a matter of personal point of view. Someone from the left of center would see him as “far right,” whereas someone that’s actually on the far right would see him as “to the left”… POV is often overlooked politically.

By using only the the last of those 50 years, you throw away 98% of the alignment data, and you introduce to the entire subsequent record an offset equal in magnitude to the annual variation from mean in that last year.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems to me it’s you who are trying to pull a fast one. As you say, the 1958 data conditions are run for 50 years or more — and then other conditions are introduced. It isn’t like the run-up has anything to do with actual earth conditions which would presumably have had different concentrations of GHGs as well as different Solar imputs, volcanic eruptions, etc. Therefore any alignment of the run-up would be misleading if carried over into the actual model scenario.

re 392 – yes, I think you’re missing something.
The 50 years of ‘1958’ have to do with the initial alignment in 1958, not the subsequent perturbations. How is it “a fast one” to repeatedly sample 1958 in the models, to try to get as accurate a starting value as possible? Hps is it NOT “a fast one” to use one year of that 50 for the alignment, when choice of that one year inflates model values and depresses observed values for the remainder of the graph – which is what willis did.

In a sense, that starting point is arbitrary. What one is really interested in is the relative increase, absent any initial alignment issues. But willis made an entire top post focussed on the alignment issue, and has repeated it since, just above in this thread. Hansen used a procedure to minimize the impact of annual variation on the initial alignment – willis threw out that procedure, and chooses just one year and thus maximizes the impact of annual variation from that year on that subsequent analysis. Since 1958 was a relatively warm year, and at least one of the models was relatively cool in that one single “modeled 1958”, that has the effect of depressing the observed curve relative to the model output curves, ENTIRELY as a result of variation in that one year, and with NO effect from the perturbation. Willis then points at that and says =- see, the modeling of the effects of the perturbation is wrong. He wrote an entire top article here arguing this, and then repeated it just above in this thread. THAT is “trying to pull a fast one.”

#373: Willis, the IPCC TAR gives an esitmate of the forcing due to land use changes of -.20 W/m^2. We’ll see what 4AR has to say about this.

Sorry about the misunderstanding on your use of the term oscillations. My impression however of the effects of things like the AMO, PDO, AO, etc., is they these oscillations serve only to redistribute heat around the globe and affect regional weather patterns. El Nino is a special case, but since it only works over a period of a year or two it could not be responsible for the observed trend of recent years.

#378: Initially I had problems relating the scales of the table and the chart so I kind of sckipped it. I went back did the necessary eyeballing — it would appear that the actual forcing in 2005 is almost exactly in between B and C. Now Willis might say tht the esitmate in scenario B is wildly wrong, but then again he could not have forseen the fall in emissions of CO2 due to the collapse of the Russian economy. It would appear that the model *under* etimated temps due to the change GHG forcings, but as Hansen pointed out a couple of decades of data is not really enough to evaluate the model performance; the close match between prediction and observation could aalso be due to simple unforced internal variability. Still, maybe the models aren’t quite as bad as some here would have us believe.

What I read in the chart is that GHG has grown noticeably slower than forecast in earlier years, with CH4 leveled off. The slowing has been such that we’re below Scenario C, which was a very optimistic (at the time) scenario.
Am I missing another aspect?

It is always good to review and summarize what has been found when going through these excercises and that is particularly true when analyzing articles and results dealing with climate science. I have noticed that the digging done at this blog often reveals not so much unreliable data but a completely different way to view them.

What does not seem to be publicized about the Hansen scenarios is that the 1988 estimates for GHG forcing rate increases without direct mitigation was significantly over estimated. It also brings home the uncertainity, not only of the computer climate models capabilities with the real world input data, but the uncertainity in predicting the future inputs that should legitimately go into the models.

Finally my best effort summation of the performance of the Hansen scenarios from eye balling the graphs (which agrees reasonably well with Willis E’s digitalized data points) gives the following:

The USA has over 4 million miles of paved roads. Assume the rest of the world has twice that much, and assume an average paved road width of 4M. Earth’s surface is 510 million sq.KM, according to Wiki. (4+8)(1.6 km/mi)(4)/(510)= 0.15. If this is right (which intuitively doesn’t seem right, but I can’t find an error in calcs), then 15% of the planet is covered by black asphalt (I know some is concrete, but go with me here for fun), which absorbs virtually all visible radiation. This has to change the planet’s albedo. Wonder if this has any effect on temperature?

Sorry I made a mistake in the above post: the predicted increases for 1988-2005 were 0.59 (A), 0.33 (B), and .40 for (C). Observed changes were .36 for GISS land station data and .32 for HadCRU land + ocean. So it looks like he hit things pretty much on the nose. I have to retract my own comments about underestimating. That’s what I get for eyeballing with bleary eyes. I think that this shows that GISS Model II had more that a little bit of skill for the relatively short timescale which is being looked at here.

it looks like I’m going to have to fire up my backofthefagpacket supercomputer again as its services in the fight against AGW propaganda are once more required. don’t forget though lads that we need some error bars on this estimate. So far it looks like 0.015% +/- 0.010%. My UK NERC approved (because of it tremendous calculational precision) supercomputer will have the answer shortly.

Steve Sadlov, it looks like the best chance for a Greenland-to-Iceland ice bridge will be in the next several weeks. The Arctic Oscillation appears to be headed sharply negative (red line on the top plot ), which tends to favor increases in sea ice extent.

There’s actually an odd patch of ice along the eastern shore of Iceland. I assume it broke away from a main body and is drifting by, headed towards warmer waters.

I still the odds are poor, though the most-recent SST anomaly map shows white (ice) very close to Icelend.

The previous big warming input was suddenly cut off. It shows on the graphs. The timing of the stopping of oil spill and the drop correspond. Ah, you may say, corellation does not imply causation. Aha, I respond, but this is climate science. Why not for me? It seems to for everyone else.